jcxky: We get it. You didn't like China. You got robbed and people were dicks. Got it. But you've sunk to making a lot of inaccurate (and possibly offensive) generalizations.

Many of the criticisms you level at China can and are made about many, many other countries (culturally relative, not innovative, demographic problems, political corruption, scammers, etc.).

Every country has major faults. Hell, most countries have the SAME faults (racism and government corruption are pretty much found everywhere, just to varying degrees). The scamming you complain about is common all across mainland Asia and Polynesia, not to mention the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as well. The cultural relativism you point to could be argued about any and every country except maybe Italy and Greece.

And the attractiveness study you cited was done by surveying undergrad students in New York City and Boston, by no means a universal indicator of attraction, and DEFINITELY not applicable on a global scale. I'm sure if you did the same study in China or Venezuela, you'd get extremely different results. What has been shown worldwide is that people are generally more attracted to people of their own race and ethnicity more than others. And that's true for everywhere. But even that's not a very useful fact in a person-to-person basis, since there are so many exceptions everywhere.

Here's what we do know:
- China's GDP is almost certainly going to pass ours in the next 10-20 years.
- China has political problems which may pull it apart at the seams. But then again, they may not. The PRC has shown itself to be pretty adaptive in the past 40 years.
- China is playing a larger and larger role all over the world and will continue to gain influence.

What will happen beyond that, we don't know. Nobody does.