An interesting thought experiment from James Fallows, to help us better understand the world and necessities from a Chinese point of view.
He also mentions the concept of "Zipper streets;" apparently, because of lack of communication, it is not uncommon for various public departments to rip up a street, dig it out, and repave it multiple times in a matter of months or even weeks. Imagine the outcry if something like that were to happen in the US! Perhaps that too speaks to some of the issues of size related to being China.
Amplify’d from www.theatlantic.com
If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, he said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.
If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmj73
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