Power Transition

The Chinese juggernaut is expected to overtake the American eagle by 2021 in terms of GDP, according to The Economist’s latest estimates (Aug 2014). In fact, China already outpaced the U.S. as the world’s largest manufacturing power in 2010. Since then, it has been further widening its lead, according to the 2013 UN research. Notwithstanding a small dent in its recent growth trend line, partly owing to a slowdown in export demand from key markets (e.g. U.S. and EU), China has been able to achieve its growth target of 7.5% in the second quarter of 2014. Yet a fleet of naysayers still do not believe these numbers indicate an upcoming shift in the world’s power distribution and, in the face of cognitive dissonance, cling to a weakly-grounded belief that United States of America continues to be the one and only hegemon at least until they rest in peace. Stiff opposition to an impending appearance of Chinese hegemony is predicated on two assumptions. The first one is that China cannot sustain its astonishing growth and is soon doomed to fall from its grace. The other is that even if China is able to surpass the U.S. in the economic area, the…

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China’s fundamentals may not be as strong as you’ve been told. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. The fix is in: China will be the next superpower. We’ve been told the economic projections all assure it, but do they? The same projections were made for the Eastern bloc in the 1960s, Japan in the 1980s, and the Asian Tigers in the 1990s. In each of those decades the conventional wisdom, particularly in the United States, whipped policymakers into a frenzy over the implications of dizzying growth numbers. And yet to varying degrees, history has proven the conventional wisdom wrong. Just as history has a tendency to repeat itself, there is strong evidence to suggest it may be wrong on China as well. First, let’s examine economic strength, upon which most “China superpower” predictions are predicated. One of the most oft-cited figures is China’s GDP. In 2013 China met its target to expand by 7.5% – more than double that of the United States, but also only slightly more than half the 14.2% it recorded only 6 years earlier. And how do these numbers stand up qualitatively? Even as GDP has plummeted, it is increasingly being funded by credit accumulation, with…

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