When will China take the Crown?

[Louis VI the Fat]

Remember how notoriously inaccurate such predictions are. Remember how they screamed that Japan will eclipse the US economy in the 80s. Take into account the similarities between Japan and China. Compare how the things said about Chinese economy now are nearly identical to the statements made about Japan thirty-twenty years ago. Take note of the real estate and stock bubble, that killed Japan, and the worries of the massive Chinese gov't spending which is feared to lead to another bubble.

And in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville made the prediction that the 20th century would see Russia and the US as the two rivalling superpowers.

Some predictions are 'more equal' than equal predictions.

Japan isn't dead. It is alive and kicking, rivalled in living standards by only the best of the west. It merely experienced slumbering growth.
China is also not Japan. Most strikingly, it is ten times its size. Most emerging nations have emerged as part of an existing system. Just how a country that is larger than all other traditional industrialised nations combined can be incorporated within such a system is still a big question. Who will be incorporated into whom? Other emerging markets are only further complicating this question.

As for India - it will grow, but I have less faith in it than in China.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Chongqing. Most people will have never heard of it. It is a provincial town. It is three times the size of Paris.

This is why our integration into a strong economic relationship with the EU and India while passively undermining China is so important.

I wouldn't be surpised if within our lifetime quarrels between democracies will be looked at with bittersweet nostalgia to a time when we could all afford such luxury.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

P.S. "Will end" ...? The 21st century's first decade ended almost three months ago...

Look, I don't know what kind of dimwits you are accustomed to, but I am getting a bit tired of your constantly adressing me as if I'm one too. Read:

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.