1. The dystopic Communist regime will continue.

While some China experts think that democratization is an inevitable first step to total economic domination, Andy Nathan, author of How East Asians View Democracy, believes otherwise. "China has authoritarian resilience," he says. "If (the current regime) was not supposed to survive modernization, it's proving very adaptable." In other words, as long as Hu Jintao's government can prove itself efficient albeit its shortcomings, the people will continue to sustain their loyalty to it.

Nathan does pinpoint one costly solution to bringing democracy and human rights to China. The current regime could be toppled, he says, if China were to be hit with a series of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and bad political decisions (like if they invaded Iraq and accrued a huge budget deficit... hint hint). If the current regime relies on a certain complacency cushioned by the fact that, while it's oppressive and fucked up, it somehow seems to be working, a mechanical failure of the government machine could unleash the unrest and cause a revolution.

Simply put: The dystopic Communist regime that punishes free will and uses forced labor to build the economy may continue to rule China until a superhuman disaster wipes it out of existence.

2. A giant amount of wind power will up the nation's hip-and-cool factor.

Green tech is the new black—it's the symbol of belonging in the hip and cool country clique. China plans to be the hippest and the coolest by 2020 by becoming the world leader in wind energy. According to EcoWorldly.com, the country currently produces about 6GW of wind energy, which makes it fifth in the world. Some experts believe that China will reach at least 100GW in the next 12 years. That's an increase of 1667%! China still relies a lot on old school energy resources like coal for its imitation Prada handbag factories, but a 2005 legislation mandates all utilities to be supplied by renewable energy. Clean tech funds are being bought up like lychees at street stands.

3. Joe Chen will be the next Steve Jobs.

While engineering is a dwindling profession in the US, it's booming in places like China and India. Only a decade or two ago, students from China entered Harvard and MIT and then stayed in the states to pursue their careers. Now, they're all going back home because they believe that's where they can have the most impact. Joe Chen, for one, is a Stanford grad who founded popular entertainment site Mop.com and Xiaonei, the local equivalent of Facebook. He's going to be the next Steve Jobs, minus the black turtleneck sweater.

Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race, believes that Beijing will be the hub of the next Silicon Valley. China also has the fastest growing number of patents—it's currently seventh in the world—and owns the world's largest Internet market. "Venture capitalists are all looking for the next new thing in China," she says. "Chinese entrepreneurs are hard working and passionate, and they're bringing knowledge from the US back home."

China isn't just the hub of cheap imitation handbags anymore. It is, finally, rapidly and most certainly, inching up the manufacturing food chain and will lead the next major innovation cycle in web-based tech.

4. Beijing will go head-to-head with Dubai in an architectural prestige contest.

Dubai is the world capital of futuristic buildings, but China's not doing so bad either. Beijing already has a crazy new airport, not to mention the Water Cube and the Birds' Nest. Plans to construct a tube-fed eco-city, islands made from scratch, and a Starfleet Academy-like museum are well underway and we should be seeing results within the next ten years. "The government agencies and building companies are going for prestige projects that break the mold," Nathan says. "They're going to continue to go for constant shock value."

We'll see what happens when the cheap IKEA-grade foundations start giving out. Until then, enjoy the cool futuristic citiscapes as they pop up left and right.

5. As China's global market share grows, so will our likelihood of becoming robotic drummers.

Right now, companies like GM, Johnson and Johnson, and Coca Cola produce first and foremost for the US market. But this will change. As the Chinese customer base catches up in size and influence, the way products are marketed and business is done will inevitably shift to meet demand. "American political values are very distinctive," Nathan says. "We believe in guns, we believe in the law, and we believe in religion. If the Chinese were dominant, the global market would be more collectivistic, harmony-oriented, less rights-concious, and more about getting through things without causing a ruckus than about suing people."

Think of Japan and the way the market there still has many of the formalities and customs native to the Japanese. "Values never completely disappear," Nathan says.

There's no doubt that China will be the biggest world market in fifty years. The question is, how is this going to affect what we do and how we do it? Maybe one day we will all become drumming androids and synchronization will supersede individuality. Images: Madiko83 via Flickr, George Lu via Flickr, and AP)

A Brief History of the Reality Distortion Field

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• Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field: Apparently the Star Trekly-esque named Bud Tribble was working on a software project for Apple in 1981, and thought he had been given an unrealistic ten-month schedule from inception to ship date. When asked why he didn't just ask Steve to change it, he reportedly said "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field." Although it turns out no one could find a connection between that term and Star Trek, and thus a legend was born.
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• The Scramble Suits from A Scanner Darkly: In Phillip K. Dick's novel about drug addiction and the paranoid world on both sides of that issue, government narcotics agents wear "scramble suits" that change every aspect of the reader, shifting at a moment's notice so that people looking at someone wearing one will never be able to tell what they look like. In the novel they shift extremely quickly, but they slowed it down in the movie to show how they work. They alter your voice as well, making you the most visible invisible man/woman around: they scramble reality for everyone except you.
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• The Matrix in The Matrix: Nothing distorts reality more than entire system of machines set up to grow you from a fetus, nurture you, and feed your brain signals that tell it you're growing up normal inside a world that doesn't exist. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Sounds pretty distorty to us, although if they decided to make us some sort of science fiction superstar inside this simulation, we probably wouldn't mind. Then you'd all be invited to the rad parties we'd throw.
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• The Holodeck in Star Trek: Seriously, we could never understand why people just didn't stay on the holodeck 24/7. Sure, it's technically "not real," but it does everything you'd want a real world to do. You've got an entire library of billions and billions of option of things to simulate, plus you can even disable the security protocols making it possible to actually die while you pretend you're inside Alice in Wonderland. It's like a portable Matrix To Go (tm), so how did they ever manage to get any work done with one of these things around?
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• The world of They Live: You can blame our current obsession with this film on the fact that it's been showing up on cable a lot lately, but there's something about this Roddy Piper/John Carpenter film that makes it hard to hate. In their world, an alien signal is being beamed out that makes humans as complacent as cattle, and stops them from seeing the aliens as they actually are. Thankfully, Roddy gets some magic glasses that help him kick ass and thwart the fugly aliens. Although in retrospect, they just wanted to make him rich. Was that so bad?
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Image above from the Joy of Tech website. Full version can be seen here.