Thanks everyone for contributing to this thread. In this post I will to address the opinions shared by posters. In the beginning I would like to note is that there were two types of arguments which were absolutely useless.
First one was: "It can not happen because it can not happen never". Well, Enoch Powell (British politician, writer and soldier) said once:
"History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen." I remember that before 2008 South Ossetia war there were plenty of observers who claimed something like this "because nobody need real war conflict" or something like this.
Shadylooking gets the medal "There-will-no-be-war":
Another one is that "Snorrius do not get economics/history/whatever". Saying opponents do not get something without explaining specifics is one of the known methods to wage forum wars, so I will discard this opinions in order to not provoke flaming and trolling by some unresponsible members.
Two members get the honorary medals of "Ye-do-not-get-this":
Winner do not know how economy works but somehow knows my views are "16th century" (though Opium wars happened in 19th century).
Lord Baal allowed himself a daring remark here though he did not really show us his own understanding of economics, international relations or history.
Of course, one thing should be clear. Unlike economic predictions which are becoming true like incoming trains on a railroad, any political and military are much more uncertain, and like many noted here have lots of "if".
Answers
The problem is that Chinese are not nearly such consumers like Europeans or Americans. They have very high savings ratio, and most of thing they consume they do themselves. The reason of this can be their isolationist mindset. So if they will be richer they will just save more.
Obviously, the present and past situations are not equal 1:1. But in a way, USA is in a much worse situation now. GB just needed rights for trade in China back then, but now USA is risking its hegemony and control over valuable assets into which China is trying to convert its humongous savings.
Six, not four, and he is
no more crazy than CIA.
Umm? WWI, WWII and a certain superpower which starts a new war every few years - all occured within last 100 years.
To do something with trade deficit and US debt falling dollar and a rising yuan will not suffice (floating rates model works perfectly only in ideal conditions, and in the case of dollar and yuan it is far from it). But you are right in that economy solution is possible, though I think most of people here will say "it is impossible" as well. Basicly USA needs to tariff everything from other states, hyperinflate dollar 3-5 times to erase internal and external debts, and reindustrialize the country.
Only up to some extent as we see now. Those countries which had which had large negative imbalances and weaker economies are falling now (Baltics, Ukraine for example). US is just much more fatter, so it will need more time to experience all the consequences.
Japan used the same excuse during WWII although Manchus were minority too back then.
As I said earlier, if China will be richer they will just save more. And they tend to consume what they produce themselves.
About Japan
A lot of answers were about Japan, so I would like to elaborate on this.
The problem of Japan is that they are going to system crash. They were repressing negative tendencies during 90s using cheap money but now it is obvious this came to the end. Money which were used by carry traders are going back to country, exports are fallin greatly and so on. Within next years Japan economy will crash, and millions will become jobless. When people are poor and hungry they tend to accept radical solutions.
So how they can reboot economy after it will happen? Military industry is one of options available. War can give people jobs, meaning of life and give government excuses for harsh measuries against riots and such. China is one of the possible target of Japanese agression (if their government will choose war option). Other possible targets are Russia and South Asia (including Australia).
And if talk about military might of China and Japan, there some things to be considered. Yes, China's military is probably in the best shape then ever. But still it is not militaristic nation while Japanese are. And to dominate in war country is not bound to have bigger population (consider Nazi Germany which were able to easily conquer most of Europe). Indeed Japanese will need to expand their military industry but they are laborious nation. Personally, I think that in hypothetical China-Japan conflict Japanese has very high chances (if they will not go for all China of course).
