Yes, given a combination of China's one child policy and a traditional preference for sons, China may be looking at 12 to 15 percent of its male population being unable to find a wife. As Jessica Levine writes at Tea Leaf Nation, that's pretty much the population of Texas.

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Though 'Shaoyang' means 'the town on the north bank of the Shao river,' it spreads along the junction of two: the pale green Shao Shui river — whose colour is said to derive from a slumbering dragon — and the wider, brown Zijiang. In 1999, the city’s population was just under half a million. From the rampart above the old city gate, one could look over an expanse of roofs whose thick gray tiles were like scales. The streets were lined with peddlers and stalls; most of the shops had roll-down shutters instead of doors. On the pavement, people washed vegetables, impaled eels on a nail, and welded engine blocks. Outside some of the restaurants there were dogs in cages that no longer bothered to bark.

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But now there's evidence of real economic pain in China. In cities like Wenzhou, entrepreneurs have found themselves mired in debt -- so hopelessly that some have gone into hiding or committed suicide.

To put the matter in perspective, we interviewed Dr. Victor Shih. An expert in Chinese politics and economy, Shih has been following the debt situation closely, and was among the first to warn of potential trouble ahead. An assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, Shih holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard. (The interview has been condensed and edited by GlobalPost.)

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No wonder Jim O'Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that "the world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the U.S. and Europe." After all, since 2007, China's economy has grown by 45 percent, the American economy by less than 1 percent -- figures startling enough to make anyone take back their predictions. American anxiety and puzzlement reached new heights when the latest International Monetary Fund projections indicated that, at least by certain measurements, the Chinese economy would overtake the U.S. by 2016. (Until recently, Goldman Sachs was pointing towards 2050 for that first-place exchange.)

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First: Mexico. Damien Cave's story in the New York Times on changing trends in Mexican emigration to the United States is a true blockbuster. There are many reasons why illegal immigration into the United States is down sharply -- new punitive laws in American states, the impact of the recession on the construction business, reforms that make it easier for Mexicans to get legitimate visas, demographic changes resulting in smaller Mexican families -- but one crucial factor with enormous implications for the future is the growth and maturation of the Mexican economy.

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CNN's John King: Governor Pawlenty, answer the critics ... who say 5 percent every year is just unrealistic ...

Pawlenty: [T]his idea that we can't have 5 percent growth in America is hogwash. It's a defeatist attitude. If China can have 5 percent growth and Brazil can have 5 percent growth, then the United States of America can have 5 percent growth.

My colleague Joan Walsh memorably zinged this argument in her debate wrapup by noting that the difference between China and the United States is that "they're building a middle class, not taking it apart, the way we are."

But the problems with Pawlenty's comparison go even deeper.

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The explanation for the cast transmogrification, according to reporters Ben Fritz and John Horn, comes down to simple dollars and cents. Hollywood can't afford to make the Chinese consumer angry.

...[P]otential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from "Red Dawn," substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

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Coincidence? On that very day, the Chinese yuan hit a record high of 6.5849 against the U.S. dollar. So maybe a legislative hammer won't be necessary. Indeed, according to a provocative post earlier last week by C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, there's been a real "breakthrough" on the yuan (also referred to as the renminbi) reevaulation front in recent months.

The nominal exchange rate of the renminbi has now appreciated by about 3.7 percent against the dollar since China announced last June that it would let the rate start moving upward again. During this same period, Chinese inflation has accelerated and is running substantially above that of the United States (which is less than 2 percent).... It is safe to say... that the real exchange rate of the renminbi has risen by at least 5 percent against the dollar over the past seven months, producing a real appreciation against the dollar at an annual rate of at least 10 percent and perhaps as much as 12 percent.

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...[T]he evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we're getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we'll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come.

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Xu Huayan, a member of China's Zhuang minority, did not appear to mind, however. She looked just as energized by the culture shock as we were. Americans do not visit Pingwen very often -- if ever, a fact partially attested to by the Chinese journalist who was filming us for a local TV broadcast. Xu quickly urged us to sit and seemed to enjoy the semi-random questions we threw at her: What crops do you grow? What programs do you watch on your TV? What do you use the Internet for?

(Answers: Tomatoes, weather forecasts, and information about agricultural production.)

She grew most animated when asked if she worked in the fields herself. "Of course," she exclaimed, pointing at her dark brown skin. "See my sun tan!?"

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But take off it did. Nanning is in the middle of a building frenzy that beggars description. New and half-finished apartment buildings rise everywhere -- the horizon is dotted with construction cranes in every direction. Traffic on the streets appears primarily divided between swarms of motorbikes and trucks carrying construction materials to and fro. The urban center of Nanning boasts a population of around 2.5 million, but seems to be preparing for an influx twice that.

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The New York Times:

In a letter to other leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers, released shortly after he arrived here, Mr. Obama tried to calm the currency tensions that have roiled global economic relations, though he did not mention by name the two most prominent sources of the tension: China's foreign-exchange interventions and the Federal Reserve's recent decision to inject $600 billion into the economy

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"Wei?"

I should have been expecting it, but the sound of that Chinese interrogative -- roughly similar to a Westerner answering a phone with the word "Hello" -- sent a surprising shock through my system. I was standing on Laguna Street in San Francisco, just outside the neighborhood known as Japan Town, but I was also suddenly transported back 25 years, to a time when I lived in Asia -- when I would automatically answer the phone by saying "Wei."

Just one word, and the reality of my imminent trip to China sank in with a vengeance. On Saturday, I will fly to Beijing for a ten-day visit to the People's Republic, my first journey back to Asia in 16 years. For far too long I've been inhabiting an imaginary China assembled from other people's blog posts and eyewitness reports, from the economic data points and trade war animosities left behind by the tides of globalization. Now, finally, I'm going to smell the smog, ride the high-speed trains, unlimber my sadly rusty Mandarin skills, and see for myself what China is all about in the year 2010.

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Stupid future-Chinese people owning us! If only we hadn't attempted stimulus spending -- we could've been as prosperous and successful as the communist nation that spent vast sums of money on massive infrastructure projects as part of their $586 billion stimulus.

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China's reasons for the move are clear: After successfully emerging from the global recession through the combined powers of a huge stimulus and an artificially weak currency, China's economy has been growing like gangbusters, and inflation is on the rise. U.S. and European central bankers would likely do the exact same thing if faced with a similar inflationary push. But China is also determined to be aggressively proactive in avoiding a potential crash. In recent months, China's leaders taken strong measures to quash the kind of disastrous property bubble that blew up the U.S. economy

From Bloomberg:

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The U.S. sorely needs tons of infrastructure upgrades. China has tons of cash -- not to mention experience in getting big infrastructural projects up and running.

So why not have China do it directly? Let China engage in a massive rebuilding of U.S. infrastructure -- it can build airports, highways, dams, and railways -- which would raise investment levels enough keep the U.S. trade deficit high in a way that benefits the U.S. and China.

Of course China would also have the right to charge for the use of these projects so that it can earn a positive return on its investment. The return doesn't even need to be high -- just better than the return it gets on its huge expansion in investment in China, which I suspect is negative for the country as a whole....

As long as it earns more than it earns on its USG bond holdings, it will be better off economically even without considering the immense advantage of keeping the U.S. trade deficit high for the eight to ten years China is going to need to rebalance its economy away from its toxic over-reliance for growth on the trade surplus and economically non-viable investment.

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Here's my question for American progressives: If you're for the little guy, are you just for American little guys? Or are you for poor underdogs even if they happen to have been born in India or China?

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The growth is rather extraordinary, even if starting from a small base. From January to July 2009, U.S. auto manufacturers exported 8,847 cars to China. In 2010 the total was 56,597. Granted, the first six months of 2009 was a grim time for economies across the world, but 10 years ago, U.S. carmakers exported only 215 cars to China for the entire year 2000. The Chinese consumer market is gaining momentum, and that could be a very, very good thing for the U.S. economy.

Unless, of course, U.S. frustration with China's artificially maintained cheap yuan boils over into a full-fledged trade war, with tariff barriers rising on both sides, to the potential detriment of both economies.

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(Readers will recall that neodymium is one of the rare earth elements that the United States no longer has the capacity to process. Neodymium magnets are used in computer hard drives, smart bombs, wind turbines, and hybrid car engines.)

Once upon a time, the U.S. did make neodymium magnets. A subsidiary of General Motors called Magnequench pumped them out, and employed 260 people to do so.

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