The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!

How many more articles will we see with the theme that the Chinese are gobbling our lunch? How many more breathless reports on tv? How many more warnings that they will gut our manufacturing? They will build a military that will make ours look like a Boy Scout troop? They will totally dominate their part of the world? They will grab all the available oil from the countries where we buy ours?

Looks like the sorts of warnings our media served up about Japan 20 years ago. Japan’s economy was going to dwarf ours. The twenty-first century was going to be Japan’s. Well, since then Japan suffered recession for over a decade. While our economy surged.

If you feel the China story will play out differently, here are a few items to consider.

China’s miraculous growth rates are not as good as those posted by Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Back when they were moving from underdeveloped to developed. Yes, those countries’ economies boomed with a bigger boom than China’s has.

China’s return on money invested is not as good as India’s. In six major industrial sectors it is not. India’s returns are 80 to 200 percent higher than China’s.

You don’t have to be an economist to understand a basic fact. Return on investment is an important thing. If your return on investment is worse than somebody else’s you are not going to emerge the winner.

Another cloud that will darken China’s future. Young people. It has too few. Old people. It has too many.

A country cannot keep up the surge when a rising percentage of old folks needs looking after. And when a falling percentage of young people has to pay higher taxes for their care.

China has so few young people because it allowed only one child per couple for so many years. It also suffers from too many young males. They will not marry because there are so few women their age. Because so many Chinese abort or smother female babies. A surplus of single males is not great for societies in a number of ways.