One of the most popular dinner party conversation topics is the possibility that the United States will be joined or even surpassed as a superpower by another nation, such as China. Let us assess the what makes a superpower, and what it would take for China to match the US on each pillar of superpowerdom. Two years ago, in May 2006, I wrote the first version of this article, and it became the most heavily viewed article ever written on The Futurist. The comments section brought a wide spectrum of critiques of various points in the article, which led me to do further research, which in turn strengthened the case in some areas while weakening it others. Thus, it is time for a tune-up on the article.
A genuine superpower does not merely have military and political influence, but also must be at the top of the economic, scientific, and cultural pyramids. Thus, the Soviet Union was only a partial superpower, and the most recent genuine superpower before the United States was the British Empire. Many Europeans like to point out that the EU has a larger economy than the US, but the EU is a collection of 27 countries that does not share a common leader, a common military, a uniform foreign policy, or even a common currency. The EU simply is not a country, any more than the US + Canada comprise a single country.
The only realistic candidate for joining the US in superpower status by 2030 is China. China has a population over 4 times the size of the US, has the fastest growing economy of any large country, and is mastering sophisticated technologies. But to match the US by 2030, China would have to :
1) Have an economy that matches the US economy in size. If the US grows by 3% a year for the next 22 years, it will be $30 trillion in 2008 dollars by then. Note that this is a modest assumption for the US, given the accelerating nature of economic growth, but also note that world GDP presently grows at a trend of 4.5% a year, and this might at most be 6% a year by 2030. China, with an economy of $3.2 trillion in nominal (not PPP) terms, would have to grow at 11% a year for the next 22 years straight to achieve the same size, which is already faster than its current 9-10% rate, if even that can be sustained for so long (no country, let alone a large one, has grown at more than 8% over such a long period). In other words, the progress that the US economy would make from 1945 to 2030 (85 years) would have to be achieved by China in just the 22 years from 2008 to 2030. Even then, this is just the total GDP, not per capita GDP, which would still be merely a fourth of America's.
The subject of PPP GDP arises in such discussions, where China's economy is measured to a larger number. However, this metric is inaccurate, as international trade is conducted in nominal, not PPP terms. PPP is useful for measuring per capita prosperity, where bag of rice in China costs less than in the US. But it tells us nothing of the size of the total economy, which could be more accurately measured in commodities like oil or gold. Nonetheless, in per capita GDP, the US surpasses any other country that has more than 10 million people (and is thus too large to rely solely on being a tax haven or tourist destination for GDP generation). From the GDP per capita chart, we can see that many countries catch up to the US, but none really can equal, let alone surpass, the US. An EU study recently estimated that the EU is 22 years behind the US in economic development. The European Chamber of Commerce estimated that the gap between the EU and US was widening further, and that it would take 75 years for the EU to catch up to the US. Again, these are official EU studies, and are thus not 'rigged by America'.
The weak dollar leads some who suddenly fancy themselves as currency experts to believe/hope that the US will lose economic dominance. However, we see from this chart that the US dollar comprises a dominant 65% of global currency reserves (an even greater share than it commanded in 1995), while the second highest share is that of the Euro (itself the combined currency of 21 separate countries) at just 25%. Furthermore, the Euro is not rising as a percentage of total reserves, despite the EU and Eurozone adding many new member nations after 2001. Which currency has any chance of overtaking the US, particularly a currency that is associated with a single sovereign nation? The Chinese Yuan represents under 2% of world reserves, and China itself stockpiles US dollars. Clearly, US dominance in this metric is enormous, and is not dwindling in the forseeable future.
2) Have a military capable of waging wars anywhere in the globe (even if it does not actually wage any). Part of the opposition that anti-Americans have to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is the envy arising from the US being the only country with the means to invade multiple medium-sized countries in other continents and still sustain very few casualties. No other country currently is even near having the ability to project military power with such force and range, despite military spending being only 3% of US GDP - a lower proportion than many other countries. Mere nuclear weapons are no substitute for this. The inability of the rest of the world to do anything to halt genocide in Darfur or other atrocities in Burma or Zimbabwe is evidence of how such problems can only get addressed if and when America addresses them.
3) Create original consumer brands that are household names everywhere in the world (including in America), such as Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonalds, Citigroup, Xerox, Microsoft, or Google. Europe and Japan have created a few brands in a few select industries, but China currently has almost none. Observing how many American brand logos have populated billboards and sporting events in developing nations over just the last 15 years, one might argue that US cultural and economic dominance has even increased by this measure.
4) Have major universities that are household names, that many of the worlds top students aspire to attend. 17 of the world's top 20 universities are in the US. Until top students in Europe, India, and even the US are filling out an application for a Chinese university alongside those of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or Cambridge, China is not going to match the US in the knowledge economy. This also represents the obstacles China has to overcome to successfully conduct impactful scientific research.
5) Become the center of gravity for all types of scientific research. The US conducted 32% of all research expenditures in 2007, which was twice as much as China, and more than the 27 combined countries of the EU. But it is not just in the laboratory where the US is dominant, but in the process to deliver innovations from the laboratory to the global marketplace. To displace the US, China would have to become the nation that produces the new inventions and corporations that are adopted by the mass market into their daily lives. From the telephone and airplane over a century ago, America has been the engine of almost all technological progress. Despite the fears of innovation going overseas, the big new technologies and influential applications continue to emerge from companies headquartered in the United States. Just in the 
last four years, Google emerged as the next super-lucrative company (before eBay and Yahoo slightly earlier), and the American-dominated 'blogosphere' emerged as a powerful force of information and media. Even after Google, a new batch of technology companies, this time in alternative energy, have rapidly accumulated tens of billions of dollars in market value. It is this dominance across the whole process of university excellence to scientific research to creating new companies to bring technologies to market that makes the US innovation engine virtually impossible for any country to surpass.
6) Attract the best and brightest to immigrate into China, where they can expect to live a good life in Chinese society. The US effectively receives a 'education import' estimated to be above $200 billion a year, as people educated at the expense of another nation immigrate here and promptly participate in the workforce. As smart as people within China are, unless they can attract non-Chinese talent that is otherwise migrating to the US, and even talented Americans, they will not have the same intellectual and psychological cross-pollination, and hence miss out on those economic benefits. The small matter of people not wanting to move into a country that is not a democracy also has to be resolved. The true measure of a country is the net difference between how many people seek to enter, and how many people seek to leave. The US has a net inflow of immigrants (constrained by quotas and thus a small fraction of the unconstrained number of people who would like to enter), while China has a net outflow of native-born Chinese. Click on the map to enlarge it, and see the immigration rate to America from the world (which itself is constrained by quotas in the US and forcible restrictions on fleeing the country in places like Cuba and North Korea).
7) Be the leader in entertainment and culture, which is the true driver of societal psychology. China's film industry greatly lags India's, let alone America's. We hear about piracy of American music and films in China, which tells us exactly what the world order is. When American teenagers are actively pirating music and movies made in China, only then will the US have been surpassed in this area. Take a moment to think how distant this scenario is from current reality. Which country can claim the title of #2 in entertainment and cultural influence? That such a question cannot easily be answered itself shows how total US dominance in this dimension really is.
8) Be the nation that engineers many of the greatest moments of human accomplishment. The USSR was ahead of the US in the space race at first, until President Kennedy decided in 1961 to put a man on the moon by 1969. While this mission initially seemed to be unnecessary and expensive, the optimism and pride brought to anti-Communist people worldwide was so inspirational that it accelerated many other forms of technological progress and brought economic growth to free-market countries. This eventually led to a global exodus from socialism altogether, as the pessimism necessary for socialism to exist became harder to enforce. People from many nations still feel pride from humanity having set foot on the Moon, something which America made possible.
China currently has plans to put a man on the moon by 2024. While being only the second country to achieve this would certainly be prestigious, it would still be 55 years after the United States achieved the same thing. That is not quite the trajectory it would take to approach the superpowerdom of the US by 2030. If China puts a man on Mars or has permanent Moon bases before the US, I may change my opinion on this point, but the odds of that happening are not high.
9) Be the nation expected to thanklessly use its own resources to solve many of the world's problems. It is certainly not a requirement for a superpower to be benevolent, but it does make the path to superpower ascension easier, as a malevolent superpower will receive even more opposition from the world than a benevolent one, which itself is already substantial. If the US donates $15 billion in aid to Africa, the first reaction from critics is that the US did not donate enough. On the other hand, few even consider asking China to donate aid to Africa. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2008 cyclone in Burma, the fashionable question was why the US did not donate even more and sooner, rather than why China did not donate more, despite being geographically much closer. Ask yourself this - if an asteroid were on a collision course with the Earth, which country's technology and money would the world depend on to detect it, and then destroy or divert it? Until China is relied upon to an equal degree in such situations, China is not in the same league.
10) Adapt to the underappreciated burden of superpowerdom - the huge double standards that a benign superpower must withstand in that role. America is still condemned for slavery that ended 140 years ago, even by nations that have done far worse things more recently than that. America's success in bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, and defending local populations from terrorists, is condemned more than the UN's inaction in preventing genocide and slavery. Is China prepared to apologize for Tianenmen Square, the genocide in Tibet, the 30 million who perished during the Great Leap Forward, and the suppression of news about SARS, every day for the next century? Is China remotely prepared for being blamed for inaction towards genocide in Darfur while simultaneously being condemned for non-deadly prison abuse in a time of war against opponents who follow no rules of engagement? The upcoming 2008 Olympics will be an event where political demonstrations are going to grab headlines perhaps to a greater degree than the sports themselves, and the Chinese leadership will be tested on how they deal with simmering domestic discontent under the scrutiny of the world media. The amount of unfairness China would have to withstand to truly achieve political parity with America might be prohibitive given China's history over the last 60 years.
Economically, is China prepared to withstand the pressures that the US presently bears? How long before the environmental movement (at least the fraction of it that is actually concerned about the environment) recognizes that China is a bigger polluter of the atmosphere than the US is, and that the road to pollution reduction leads straight to China? How long before China is pressured to donate aid to Africa in the manner that the US does? What happens when poorer nations benefit from Chinese R&D expenditures, particularly if those are neighboring countries that China is not friendly with?
Furthermore, China being held to the superpower standard would simultaneously reduce the burden that the US currently bears alone, allowing the US to operate with less opposition and more equitable treatment than it experiences today. Is China prepared to take on the heat? Arguably, there is evidence that the Chinese public has not even begun to think that far.
Of the ten points above, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have tried for decades, and have only achieved parity with the US on maybe two of these dimensions at most. China will surpass European countries and Japan by 2030 by achieving perhaps two or possibly even three out of these ten points, but attaining all ten is something I am willing to confidently bet against. The dream of anti-Americans who relish the prospect of any nation, even a non-democratic one, surpassing the US is still a very distant one.
A point that many bring up is that empires have always risen and fallen throughout history. This is partly true, but note that the Roman Empire lasted for over 1000 years after its peak. Also note that the British Empire never actually collapsed since Britain is still one of the most successful countries in the world today, and the English language is the most widely spoken in the world. Britain was merely surpassed by its descendant, with whom it shares a symbiotic relationship. The US can expect the same sort of very long tail if it is finally surpassed, at some point much later than 2030 and probably not before the Technological Singularity, estimated for around 2050, which would make the debate moot.
That writing this article is even worthwhile is a tribute to how far China has come and how much it might achieve. I would not bother to write such an article about, say, India or Germany (the largest of the 27 EU countries). Nonetheless, there is no other country that will be a superpower on par with the US by 2030. This is one of the safest predictions The Futurist can make.
More on American Exceptionalism by Tunku Varadarajan at Forbes.
Related :
The Winds of War, the Sands of Time
Who Hates America?
Who Does America View Favorably?
The Age of Democracy
The Culture of Success
