Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
nabla9 · 2020-05-30 · Original thread
Japan was the Bogeyman.

The Coming War With Japan, 1991 by George Friedman https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0...

nabla9 · 2018-03-18 · Original thread
History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.

Strong rhymes from the 80's and 90's when Japan was the boogieman. Replace Japan with China to update into the present moment.

1) Fear of Japanese AI was real in the 80's. The fifth generation computers (massive parallelism with prolog programs)[1].

2) Fear of Japanese buying the rest of the world [2] and unfair trade tactics.

3) Trump attacking Japan for trade and considering a presidential run with trade war and tariffs [3].

4) The war with Japan is inevitable [4].

5) Under all this Japan had 'demographic time bomb' and real estate boom reaching the maximum.

China will undoubtedly face many of the same problems as Japan did, but the scales are different (both time and magnitude). China has still at least two decades to go. The country is still undergoing urbanization and has to fit over 100 million people into cities. While Chinese growth can't be as high as in last decades, their growth will still outpace the West for a long time.

It's very unlikely that China just fizzles and stays paralyzed for more than a decade like Japan did. Either Chinese solve their problems or the problems will destabilize China internally.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer

[2]: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyin...

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/over-four-decades-tr...

[4]: The Coming War With Japan by George Friedman , Meredith Lebard https://www.amazon.com/Coming-War-Japan-George-Friedman/dp/0...

Fresh book recommendations delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday.