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Originally Posted by Katsunami
While I agree with most of what you wrote, I don't know if China is a 1st world country yet; Russia isn't, in my book. I think they're 2nd world, to be honest, at least major parts of them. I know there are some very rich parts/cities in there (as there are in some third world countries as well), but I don't think the general population has caught up to Western European/American/Japanese (etc) standards yet.
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I don't think
any country that size can be an
entirely First World country. There is simply far too much to be developed, and nowhere near enough time since the effort began to do it.
China is a First World industrial power to its trading partners, since what they deal with is the developed regions, like Shenzen. There will be large masses elsewhere that will be Terra Incognita.
And Russia is handicapped by xenophobia. Back before the Soviet Union imploded, there was an article in Fortune magazine about future demographic woes for the Soviets. The Communist Party was in dictatorial control with a centrally planned economy, but there simply weren't enough ethnic white Russian Slavs to fill all of the managerial positions, and they were being forced to give at least some power to members of various other ethnic groups that had become absorbed into the Soviet hegemony. The politburo and Central Committee weren't happy, but had no choice. I think there's still a fair bit of that. (Paranoia and xenophobia aren't a surprise, since a good deal of history since the days the area was still Rus consisted of attempts to invade and pillage by folks from elsewhere. I don't especially blame Russians for being less than trusting of other peoples.)
The problem with any such polity is how you assimilate new folks into the dominant culture, and it's made harder when neither side
wants them to be assimilated.
A chap I did business with years ago was an Irishman who emigrated to the US via Scandinavia (and came here because he couldn't make
money in Scandinavia.) He described studying history in school back in Ireland, with the lessons stopping at the point
before Bismark largely redrew the political maps of Europe. Looking at what was going on then (the early 90's), with the reappearance of various countries that had been absorbed by something else and were now independent again, he commented that things were starting to look like the Pre-WWI maps again. I thought he had a point.
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China is fast approaching though, or companies wouldn't be moving production to Indonesia, India, Malaysia and the Philippines.
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Work flows to where it can be done cheapest, and really always has. Government efforts to prevent it and preserve local industries and jobs are ultimately doomed to failure. (A good bit of the problems in the Euro-zone can be analyzed as side-effects of government efforts to do that. Institute a common currency and common accounting standards, and it becomes quite obvious who is actually competitive and who has been cooking to books to cover up the fact that they aren't...)
Stuff is shifting to Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the like because it's cheaper to do it there than it is to do it in China.
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Dennis