Quote Originally Posted by CNN
You have five more years to learn Mandarin.

Will China take the crown?

Angus Maddison's forecast (which uses purchasing power parity) isn't built on outlandish assumptions. He assumes China's growth will slow way down year by year, and America's will average about 2.6% annually, which seems reasonable. But because China has grown so stupendously during the past decade, it should still be able to take the crown in just seven more years.
If that happens, America will close out a 125-year run as the No. 1 economy. We assumed the title in 1890 from - guess who. Britain? France? No. The world's largest economy until 1890 was China's. That's why Maddison says he expects China to "resume its natural role as the world's largest economy by 2015." That scenario makes sense.



China was the largest economy for centuries because everyone had the same type of economy - subsistence - and so the country with the most people would be economically biggest. Then the Industrial Revolution sent the West on a more prosperous path. Now the world is returning to a common economy, this time technology- and information-based, so once again population triumphs.



http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/29/maga...ion=2008043005
For Americans, 2008 is an important election year. But for much of the world, it is likely to be seen as the year that China moved to center stage, with the Olympics serving as the country's long-awaited coming-out party. The much-heralded advent of China as a global power is no longer a forecast but a reality. On issue after issue, China has become the second most important country on the planet. Consider what's happened already this past year. In 2007 China contributed more to global growth than the United States, the first time another country had done so since at least the 1930s. It also became the world's largest consumer, eclipsing the United States in four of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities. And a few months ago China surpassed the United States to become the world's leading emitter of CO2. Whether it's trade, global warming, Darfur or North Korea, China has become the new x factor, without which no durable solution is possible.

And yet the Chinese do not quite see themselves this way. Susan Shirk, the author of a recent book about the country, "The Fragile Superpower," tells a revealing tale. Whenever she mentions her title in America, people say to her, "Fragile? China doesn't seem fragile." But in China people say, "Superpower? China isn't a superpower."


In fact it's both, and China's fragility is directly related to its extraordinary rise. Lawrence Summers has recently pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution the average European's living standards rose about 50 percent over the course of his lifetime (then about 40 years). In Asia, principally China, he calculates, the average person's living standards are set to rise by 10,000 percent in one lifetime! The scale and pace of growth in China has been staggering, utterly unprecedented in history—and it has produced equally staggering change. In two decades China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.
Recall what China looked like only 30 years ago. It was a devastated country, one of the world's poorest, with a totalitarian state. It was just emerging from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed universities, schools and factories, all to revitalize the revolution. Since then 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China—about 75 percent of the world's total poverty reduction over the last century. The country has built new cities and towns, roads and ports, and is planning for the future in impressive detail.


http://www.newsweek.com/id/81588
We are witnesses to one of the biggest events in world history. The full scale of the rise of China ecplises anything that the world has ever seen before. Never have so many people, in such a short amount of time, made so much progress as China has in three decades.

For effect, both artocles above are two years old. Since then, the West has seen its financial system collapse, saved by the biggest loans in the history of mankind. China has been going from strenght to strenght. As have many other emerging economies.

Power has definately shifted from the West to a multipolar world. A decade that began with neo-conservative dreams of using America's unrivalled hegemony to assert and prolong this hegemony, will end up in the history books as the one that saw the definitive end of Western hegemony. Economically and politically. Unfortunately morally too, but not quite culturally.

For once, it is worth stating the obvious: China alone has twice the inhabitants of the EU and the US combined. This will have far-reaching consequences, not all of whom have fully sunk in.
Ninety percent of the world's population does not live in Western countries, and they have awoken.