The world can't sustain a China middle class the same with similar proportion/consumption as the US (look at per capita oil consumption, fresh water consumpion, CO2 production, et al). That's maybe the bigger story in a bigger sense.
Can you provide any support for this statement? I don't believe population directly correlates with the size of your economy. I only ask because if America is going to remain relevant, its citizens need to stop making shit up as they go.
There is a ratio between them based on how productive your workforce is. German workers, for example, are thought to be very productive. But expressed as a GDP-per-person ratio, not as productive as US workers. China is far behind in productivity, yet their enormous population means they're ahead in total dollars. And as Chinese workers move from low-productivity work such as family farming to industrial farming & factory work, their population will act as a lever and grow their GDP even more so.
China: GDP 16,149 Pop 1,357,380
US: GDP 16,768 Pop 320,206
Germany: GDP 3,512 Pop 80,716
(millions and thousands, respectively)
So the GDP per-person ratio of each country is:
China: $0.01189
US: $0.05236
Germany: $0.04351
Expressed in terms of productivity, China still has a lot of growing room, and I would expect their GDP numbers to continue to grow in the future.
How about India? They will soon be the most populated country in the world? Indonesia has about 250m people? Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria? All these countries have large populations. They probably have a lot of "growing room" too.
In short, this claim is meaningless:
"China has 3 times the population of the US. As soon as they started growing a middle class, it was inevitable that this would happen."
That gets into the societal aspects - after working for their basic subsistence, how much time in the day is left for working on other things that they could sell. In the US, the creation of industrial-scale farming meant that food became plentiful and cheap enough so that there was capacity & time left over for work that could then be used to create a profit.
There are other factors at play of course. India has an enormous bureaucracy that soaks up much of their excess capacity and stifles innovation. The remains of the caste system also means that some of their most productive people aren't working effectively. Nigeria is doing much better these days, but still suffers with a large amount of corruption. Pakistan & Brazil - I don't know enough to comment - perhaps you can fill in why they aren't growing as fast as they might.
