Why Bill Gates Sees China's Rise As 'Huge Win For The World,' Opposes US Hawkish 'Lose-Lose Mentality'

Billionaire Bill Gates recently had some very positive things to say about China and emphasized the need for global nations working together.

Rags To Riches: China has gone from being an incredibly impoverished nation, poorer than India, with starvation and malnutrition in 1980 to being the most-wealthy middle-income country in the world, Gates said while speaking at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia this week.

“It’s only 1.4 billion people, so it’s incredible, and it’s great for the world,” he said.

"No, it's not a democracy," Gates pointed out. Although, when there's a very large middle class that doesn’t want an arbitrary rule of law, "will there be some point in time when it moves in that direction?" the billionaire asked.

“They're an outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as autocratic as they are,” Gates noted.

“I tend to see China's rise as a huge win for the world,” the Microsoft co-founder said. China is 20 percent of the global population, which exactly matches its portion of the global economy, Gates noted. That compares to countries like Australia and the U.S. that have per capita GDP five times that of China, which is a "disproportionate share of the world's economy," he said.

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Lose-Lose Mentality Won't Help: The current mentality of the U.S. toward China, which is reciprocated by China, is "kind of a lose-lose mentality," he said. He noted that if you ask U.S. politicians whether they would like the Chinese economy to shrink by 20% or grow by 20%, "I'm afraid they would vote, that yeah, let's immiserate those people [Chinese]."

Gates said Washington lawmakers don't understand that the U.S. and China need to work together on issues like the global economy, the invention of cancer drugs, and the solution to climate change.

“We're humans, we innovate together, and we have to change the modern industrial economy together in a pretty dramatic fashion,” he added.

Gates believes he's in the minority among Americans, "where people are kind of hawkish, and I think that could be self-fulfilling in a very negative way."

Read next: Bill Gates Asked Why He's Buying So Much US Farmland: Here's His Answer In Free-For-All AMA

Photo: Courtesy of Red Maxwell on flickr.