Originally Posted by JOD
Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by buster
Well, the Chinese civilization is over 3,000 years old. They aren't going anywhere and in fact, if something ever did develop that was a serious global pandemic, I'd put money on them surviving lol.
One thing I noticed after watching the show Bizarre Foods is most other countries eat a much more expansive list of animals. I obviously don't like the thought of people eating cats and dogs but it would likely be worse for them in nature if they got jacked by a predator. Then you hear the argument- What makes a cat better than a Cow or Pig? Every living thing has to consume another living thing for energy. There is no way around that. And I LOVE animals.
Some of it is crazy but it really brings you back to how brutal nature is and how not bad humans are by comparison.
It's not the age of the civilization, it's the population density. There has never been a time or place on earth where there existed a population of north of a billion people and China is just under 1.5 billion. In fact, in the last 30 years, China's population has grown more than the entire population of the United States, Canada and Australia combined! This is a new experiment, and I wouldn't bank on China's age being any form of mitigating factor. I don't think this is sustainable and I believe we are in for a "correction" event, whether it's WWIII or some pandemic. My money is on the latter.
Having spent a lot of time there in the last few years, I'm hard-pressed to disagree with you. Thing is, people look at the population numbers and the land mass and think "oh, that's not so bad"; but almost all of the people are concentrated into a really small area (probably 1/5th of the country).
While it may be a "new" experiment, they're not along. India has an even higher population density, and they're set to surpass China in total population in a few years. At least China's population growth is very low. I also think that India much less well-equipped to deal with a serious pandemic.
These heat maps do a good job of visualizing the disparity in population density:
https://imgur.com/gallery/X4x7q
Yup, India is the other population density pandora's box. It just seems that China has a track record of these events at this point, whilst India has managed to avoid them for now.