Long-term growth forecasts for China are usually pretty crazy since many take straight-line projections based on the kind of expansion we’ve seen in the past ten years or so. This kind of growth is unsustainable, of course, which is why those forecasts are mostly nuts.

Great article in Businessweek, which reports on several predictions on where China will be in 25 years. The predictions were made in a report by the China Academy of Social Science (CASS), one of the country’s premier think tanks.

Many of the "China scare" folks think that the PRC will grow so rapidly that it will take over the world in the next few decades. Hard to see how this will happen if this prediction by CASS turns out to be accurate:

China’s projected GDP per capita shows an even starker gap with the U.S.: $1,867 in 2005, increasing to about $4,000 in 2030 and $4,500 in 2035. In 2006, the U.S. GDP per capita was about $44,000.

This prediction should be taken together with another stating that income inequality will remain a big problem here for a long time. In other words, while GDP per capita in China will remain well below U.S. figures, the average Shanghai resident in 2030 may have a lot more in common with someone in New York than someone in a rural town in Inner Mongolia.

These numbers seem a lot more reasonable than the double-digit-growth-for-30-years crowd.

Good reality check.