As modern China turns 60, can we foresee its future?

By Andrew Marshall, Asia Political Risk Correspondent - Analysis

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - "Things develop ceaselessly," said Chairman Mao Zedong in 1956, noting how much China had changed in 45 years. "In another 45 years... the beginning of the 21st century, China will have undergone an even greater change. She will have become a powerful socialist industrial country."

As forecasts go, it was pretty prescient.

Yet while China's rise may seem inevitable in retrospect as it marks 60 years of Communist rule, the path it has taken was anything but predictable. China weathered the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the traumatic Tiananmen Square crackdown and emerged remarkably stable and pragmatically governed.

The surprises of the last six decades have not deterred an army of pundits from trying to peer into China's future, making forecasts not just a few years ahead, but decades.

In economics, the most influential attempt to chart China's prospects has been Goldman Sachs' research on the "BRICs": Brazil, Russia, India and China. Goldman predicts China will overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy by 2027.

Some say the BRICs concept actually underplays China's growing importance. "Among the BRICs, China is the 800-pound panda in the room," said Markus Jaeger of Deutsche Bank Research.

"If China maintains near double-digit growth rates, its contribution to global growth will continue to vastly outweigh that of the other BRICs," he wrote in a research note this week.

Efforts to forecast China's political, geopolitical and military future are just as feverish.

"China is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country," the U.S. National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends 2025" report said.

"By 2025, China will have the world's second-largest economy and will be a leading military power. It also could be the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter."

While most forecasts regard China's ascent as almost inevitable, not everybody is so sanguine. George Friedman, founder and chief executive of geopolitical analysis firm STRATFOR, believes China will fragment by 2020.

"I don't share the view that China is going to be a major world power," Friedman wrote in "The Next 100 Years," which ambitiously attempts to predict the entire upcoming century. "I don't even believe it will hold together as a unified country."

PREDICTION IS DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THE FUTURE

The evidence suggests forecasts of China's long-term future should be treated with caution. Studies of political forecasting have found most pundits do no better in predicting the future than if their forecasts had been based on the toss of a coin.

"When I have staged competitions, many forecasters fail to outperform the proverbial dart-throwing chimpanzee," psychologist Philip Tetlock said in the latest issue of The National Interest.