How Will We Know When China is Number One?

How Will We Know When China is Number One?

Apr 29, 2014 02:00 am | Peter Harris

Peter Harris

It has been conventional wisdom for well over a decade that China is a rising power. The statistics on China’s current size and projections about its future growth have become such clichés that they scarcely warrant repeating. Suffice to say that most observers agree that China, already the world’s most populous country and one of its military and economic powerhouses, will replace the United States as the world’s largest economy at some point mid-century. The implied corollary is that, if unstopped either by external pressure or internal fissure, China inexorably is set to replace the United States as the world’s dominant military and geopolitical force in due course. Pax Sinica impends.
By most accounts, however, the American Era is far from over. As of 2014, the United States still boasts the largest economy in the world and a vastly superior GDP per capita to China, which, its leaders are keen to remind the world, still considers itself a developing nation. It is U.S. leadership that remains truly essential for global agreements to be concluded and implemented, and it is towards Washington that the world looks when global, regional and local crises emerge. The Pentagon’s budget continues to dwarf those of its rivals. And while the People’s Liberation Army might look menacing from the perspective of Tokyo, Taipei or Manila, China’s military hardly constitutes a direct threat to the United States. China, on the other hand, finds itself encircled by a string of formal and tacit U.S. alliances from the western Himalayas to the East China Sea.
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