I answered the comment which used "extremely poor" and "subsistence farmers" so I used the international poverty line ($1.90). At $3.2 (World Bank's lower middle income poverty line), it was 12.1% or 160 million people, but that was 2013. The number dropped rapidly every year. It should be lower now.
Purchasing parity is a good measure for living standards. You can buy a full meal for 10 yuan or $1.5 in rural China. It is not fair to measure their income with no adjustment. Cooking for a family may cost less than that. $1 in rural China is worth much more than $1 in the US.
Your quotes were from 2014. China is improving every year. You can Google for more recent statistics and quote them here if you disagree.
The current number of extremely poor people in China is less than 30 million, less than 2% of population.
From Google:
"According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."
In 2017 there are around 600 million people in rural area. Their average monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. Cost of living there is cheap and this is middle income, not poor.
US pension funds together are worth $22 trillion. This is 61% of global pension funds and much much larger than the Saudi funds. They should invest a small part into Vision Funds and other VCs!
The current statistics in 2017 is around 600 million in rural area. Their monthly income is 3300 yuan or around 500 USD, more than $15 a day. According to World Bank, a country with $6000 USD a year is upper-middle income.
If you count their rural areas as a nation, its GDP is $3.6 trillion around the same size as Germany, 4th largest in the world.
Some populations practice having as many children as they can because their belief system calls for it. They believe they will get more brownie points from a supreme being for that.
So these groups will get more share of the basic income in the next generation and more in the next and so on and so on...
What does Italy have that China cannot produce itself? Brand name products, basic machines and chemicals which Italy exports are not important to their development.
Russia has oil, minerals and iron which China needs to grow.
China's shifting to domestic consumption and strong Yuan is better than weak Yuan. Strong currency will also reduce capital flight from the country and increase its financial powers to buy world resources such as mining rights and companies abroad.
They understand how the dollar status as reserve currency helps strengthen American power. Many Chinese leaders understand the power of finance. They have used it to develop export-oriented economy and they are now using it to expand their power abroad.
China is now confident it is strong enough and has resources and relationships to counter US pressure.
I don't think the religions preach what people want to hear. They built procreation into their belief system to make sure they will have bigger and bigger adherents. It works and many of those religions are much larger today than others without procreation preaching.
Several major religions in poor developing countries preach having more kids. They don't care about environmental impact or sustainability. They believe their God will provide.
People care about many things. But if they get one good thing like intelligence without losing others, they will go for it.
In China, they do not have religious reasons against improving humans. And parents rely on kids to take care of them when they are old. Intelligence often predicts earnings. So if it's safe, they will do it.
Other powers have nukes too, so using it is out of the question. If nukes are not used, technology and economic capacity will determine the results.
Russia has a lot of good engineers and scientists but they don't have the industrial capacity to compete with the US. China's current capacity may already be double that of the US but its technology is still catching up (fast).
Winning wars requires intelligence not raw calculations. A nation with 10 extra IQ points on average would have many times more people with 130+ IQ needed to build and improve on advanced robots.
Btw, have you checked the list of top supercomputers in the world? The top two are in China. The top one has 4-5 times the power of the top American machine, which is #4. It also uses Chinese built microprocessors.
Modern advanced society already requires a high minimum intelligence for people to function in especially to hold a respectable job or be a respectable member of a community. The minimum is increasing when more automation is used for most kinds of automation.
If someone's children will likely have a lower than this minimum intelligence, which you can infer from parent's IQ and other measures, will you encourage or prohibit them to use either embryo selection or genetic engineering? What are the impact on the child's life for each option? Is the 'distaste' more important than giving a better opportunity for the newborns?
Also, what can you do? You cannot put regulations on China or other countries. On this issue, they will not agree on international agreement either. And there will be rich people who fly to other countries to have the procedures done. This will cause even more inequality than allowing it domestically.
To relate this to the news about CTE in American Football, I wonder how much American mental potential has been lost to CTE.
One thing for sure, very few East Asian and few Asian American parents who are aware of the news will allow their kids to play the sport.
What about the reactions from other American parents?
"Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury."
There were about 1,100,000 million high school players in 2014. This is approximately 7% of US high school students.
To flesh out a large range of implications will take at least an effort worthy of a PhD dissertation.
With successful embryo selection, at least we can keep up with the increasingly higher minimum IQ needed to function well in advanced society and avoid a large underclass of unemployable people.
Or they could build billions of robots with thousands of variations to make everyone live like a king.
And they will have high enough IQ to maintain and improve them as they wish. Without say IQ of 100 or more maintenance of advanced robots could be problematic.
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN
Purchasing parity is a good measure for living standards. You can buy a full meal for 10 yuan or $1.5 in rural China. It is not fair to measure their income with no adjustment. Cooking for a family may cost less than that. $1 in rural China is worth much more than $1 in the US.
Your quotes were from 2014. China is improving every year. You can Google for more recent statistics and quote them here if you disagree.