China's GDP has been growing at between 7 and 10 percent for decades. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at this rate, it will surpass the US as the largest economy at some point in the 2020's.

It is unclear whether or not the Chinese government will assert itself on the world stage and actively compete with the US for the position as the center of gravity in global affairs.

The Chinese WILL take over the world and they have some scores to settle - so watch out.

The populace in China really does believe that the West has been keeping them in a state of poverty and suppression for decades. They believe this mostly due to the fact that the Chinese government wants them to believe it use their control of the media to ensure that they do.

They cannot seem to understand that most of their problems were due to communism - an ideology that has failed almost everywhere it has been adopted.

The Chinese would argue that they have created a new form of communism (increased civil rights, more reliance on market economy) that works for them and would have worked in the places that communism has failed

Don't forget another asset the Chinese have that the Soviets didn't: high tech. If the Soviets had facial recognition everywhere and high-tech eavesdropping, maybe they would have been able to subjugate their population to a level where they would have tolerated their poverty.

The Chinese are making all of the moves you would expect if they were planning for world domination. For example, they are building their own aircraft carriers. They only purpose of an aircraft carriers is to project power.

Absolutely. It's just a matter of time.

The Chinese economy will fall off a cliff just like the Japanese economy did in the 1990s. Japan rose too far too fast, then crashed and never came back.

China is going to suffer the same fate.

The Chinese have an epic real estate bubble that will likely cause a crash of their economy the way the mortgage backed security crisis of 2008 caused a massive recession in the west.

That could bring down the whole house of cards.

They also recently put their own GPS satellites into orbit. That's something you only do if you think you might go to war with the US - who can turn off your access to the GPS already up there.

Not a good omen.

The Chinese are good at planning for the long-term future, unlike the US which can only plan ahead to the next election cycle. This will probably be our undoing.

The Chinese are investing huge money in 5G, artificial intelligence, clean energy.

When these investments pay off, the US (and the west) will be unable to catch up.

Not a chance. Idiot Trump is going to see to that personally.

He may be an idiot but you have to admit he is doing a pretty good job at bringing them to the negotiating table with all of his bluster and tariffs.

Agreed - but this is the only thing he has done that matters during his presidency.

China has a population that is larger than the US and Europe put together. It shouldn't be a surprise that they are finally using their leverage to increase their standing in the world.

Reminds me of the quote:

The 19th century belonged to the UK.
The 20th century belonged to America
The 21st century will belong to China.

Exactly why the Chinese elected Xi Jinping for life. American presidents only have 4 or 8 years to implement changes. Xi has decades.

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The US and EU will eventually gang up on China once the reach a certain threshold power.

Eventually it will be too late. The US alone could have crushed the Chinese economy like a peanut in the 1990s/2000s.

Today, it's not clear who has more leverage.

What scares me most is their massive investment in artificial intelligence. If they get to human-level artificial intelligence first, there is no telling how they will abuse it.

They could very well dominate the world with A.I. alone - never mind the size of their economy or military. A.I. will change the world in many ways. It' scary to envision a world where China owns it.

The Chinese govt has the ability to use face recognition to identify a jaywalker and sent him/her a ticket by text message within seconds of crossing the street.

I think we can safely say that the Chinese cannot be trusted with A.I.

They will have no restraint.

Why do they have to get to human-level A.I. first? Even if they are fifth or twentieth, they will still have it - which is the scary part.

The only hope is that human level AI is not possible (many think so)

Maybe, but not anytime soon.

They believe they have been kept in a state of poverty by the West because they HAVE been kept in a state of poverty by the west.

Yeah, we're very good at that.

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They will have significant influence, but truly owning the world means taking it by force. The Chinese will never pick a fight with the US.

They could easily wage a cyber war against the west which could be catastrophic. Hacking power plants in the dead of winter could have a death toll comparable to bombing NYC.

Yes and blocking access the internet in the US could crash the economy.

NO

China does not have the educational system they would need to be a world power. How many of the top 50 schools in the world are in china? Not many.

There are hardly any Chinese schools in the top 100:

https://thebestschools.org/rankings/best-universities-world-today/

That is an overrated factor. They don't need great schools in China. The best and brightest Chinese kids just go to Europe or the US for college, then go back home.

And also now that we have wikipedia and Siri the value of attending ANY college is rapidly diminishing.

It absolutely will. And probably in the next 5 years.

We're the ones who are a house of cards. We owe over $22 trillion.
China owns a large amount of US debt. They could bring our house of cards crashing down at any time.

Yes, and then India.

The Illuminati will never let it happen (just kiddin')

Maybe the Illuminati controls the Chinese govt just like they do ours - so why do they care one way or the other?

All joking aside, there are powerful interests who would much prefer the US running things than China. China is an unknown with totalitarian leanings. Big money doesn't like that.

They are probably monitoring this discussion right now and planning to round everyone up who said anything disparaging about China once the invasion is over.

That actually sounds pretty plausible

China’s rise is the result of a combination of factors since it reoriented on production within global capitalism in the 1980s. First, in contrast to the Soviet bloc, China found a way to benefit in a twist of historical irony from its colonial legacy. Britain controlled Hong Kong up until 1997, Portugal controlled Macau up to 1999, and the US continues to use Taiwan as a protectorate.

Good article on this:

https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/insights/27828/how-china-s-rise-has-remade-global-politics

It's true that the Chinese economy will pass the US soon, but the GDP per capita will still be far lower than the US for a very long time.... and that is arguably the more important measure of economic prosperity.