To be honest, I just skimmed it, but I really do believe that China is slowly losing power, and this report further strengthened my assessment. We've already seen manufacturing move out of China to even cheaper third-world countries. China has grown too much for its own good.

Population is still the single largest determining factor in power. Barring severe technological/governmental deficiencies (which may happen), China should eventually become more powerful than the US. Arable land and natural resources are also important factors after population, which may give the US an edge over China.

Gunf, did you hear about the poor person in China who wanted to kill someone but couldn't get access to a gun and so battered the person to death with a pair of chopsticks, these commies are all violent homicidal maniacs, God Bless the US of A. Please stand for a rendition of the national anthem and a flag raising ceremony.

OK, who the fuck left their computer logged on the internet so Nigee could get around the restrictions his parents put on his computer?

@ Alex987

I think that natural resources and arable land are more important than population. China has 1.3 billion mouths to feed, 1.3 billion people to move, several hundred million homes to provide electricity and water and so on. At the end of the day, you have a lot of people using all of your resources.

America is lean and mean (not referring to America's obesity problem here) compared to China

@ NigeeBaby

That was uncalled for. I have not yet said anything to insult China or show my own fierce nationalism.

GunF ...... shoot me now !!

Yes but labor = money which can be used to buy the resources. It's a simplified formula, but assuming that the people produce more than they consume (which should be unless there are governmental problems), resources can be bought, just like the food that China currently buys from mostly overseas because the US is one of the only countries in the world that can feed itself off its own crops. You can always buy resources, but you can't buy population.

Population is far from China's trump card. It has a rapidly aging population which will need a much. much better pension and health care system than the country currently has, and at the same time there will be fewer workers to pay for it all. Imagine most of the problems Japan has, and then add an oppressive communist dictatorship. With problems like that the party leaders might just decide to take Taiwan or pick another silly fight with Vietnam to distract the hordes of angry old people.

If it were all about population, then India would be a much bigger player than it is and Great Britain and Germany wouldn't be where they are. Germany has about 82 million people, less than 1/4 the US population, and yet that have a *very* strong economy and are more a world leader than India could ever be. Why is this? Because they have financial ethics and a sense of both local and global fiscal and social responsibility.

Now, nobody go interpretting that in some Godwin's Law kind of way. Germany now, is a serious and valued member of the international community. Without them, the EU would pretty much have collapsed.

+1 to Invictus. I'm no China expert, but I can hardly see how having an oppressive communist regime gives a nation long-term prospects for prosperity. Maybe (hopefully) they can evantually transition to a healthier government, but if not who knows what happens? Civil war? Seperatist movement/s?

I also disagree with population being important...if you look at all the nations in the world above 100 mil population, only Japan, the US, and China approach superpowerdom. Russia was there at one point, but isn't now. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico...yeah, none of them are even close to having any real advantage on the world stage over, say, Germany, the UK, or France...or even Australia.

"Russia" was never there. The USSR was, but the USSR consisted of many more nations than just Russia. That would be like saying "Washington DC had great power once but not so much today" if the US ever fell. No DC is just the capital of the US and Russia was just the defacto capital of the USSR.

Russia still has potential, it's still recovering from the clusterfuck that was the dissolution of the soviet union and the troubled decade that followed but if things are stable Russia has lots of land, easy acsess to Chinese migrant labor in Siberia, and natural resources. It just has just been neglected by many of the people with financial resources due to the instability of the system.

I have believed for a long time and will believe for a long time that if a single powerful nation is to emerge from the Middle East, that nation will emerge as the one and only world power. Oil talks, as sad as it is.

No country in the middle east has any potential to be a super power simply in terms of population, quality of land, and natural resources. Sure oil money will build you cities like Dubai, but the a city like that is a farce, and oil money can only give you that.

Russia is in even worse demographic shape than China or Japan. In addition to that its economy is almost entirely based on extraction industries,. Once shale gas and fracking for oil really start happening the price for those goods will drop a hell of a lot, leaving Russia with an nearly American sized deficit without American sized credit. I wouldn't want to be Putin running in 2018 with that mess to deal with.

Yeah, I agree with Svidrigailov. The so-called Arab Spring only marks a new chapter in the sectarian clusterfuck that is the Middle East. Oil is power, and as long as oil flows from the Persian Gulf outside forces will seek to control and protect it, but there is simply too much rivalry and tension, not to mention a completely non-diverse economy for any Middle East regional power to become a world power.

Also, it's hard to know what is going on inside of the PRC because of government control of everything. I truly hope that there is an active underground movement to overthrow the communist regime. China is the last large communist power and communism may be defeated once and for all once China falls.

these commies are all violent homicidal maniacs, God Bless the US of A. Please stand for a rendition of the national anthem and a flag raising ceremony.

It's not like we have 12,000+ shootings every year...

@Invictus, I by no means am saying that Russia is a booming country, but unlike the US which is has been developed and over developed, Russia despite being in a hole and in bad economic shape has a lot of potential.

I disagree, Draugnar. Russia was certainly a power to be reckoned with 100 years ago. That's why it's one of the seven on the map.

In my defense, communists have historically been violent genocidal maniacs.

Um, Russian is one of the top five critical languages on the NSA website. Even if Russia isn't currently a world power, they're a threat to the world power, which, in a roundabout sort of way, makes them a power, no?

Everyone who says Russia isn't a world power is not paying attention to the right things. They have thousands of *nuclear weapons* and the launching platforms for them, they had so much leftover military material that they sold half of it to China and still have one of the largest militaries in the world. Not to mention that our astronauts hitch rides in Russian Soyuz capsules, or that they have a much brighter economic future than the good ol' US of A.

If you look at it in a singular dimension, yes US trumps them, but if you - to use a math term - take the derivative of power for both nations; Russia is looking much better.

And this article only deals with a single dimension of Chinese power. While it is true that Chinese soft power (economy, society, culture) may have peaked, or at least will grow slowly from now on, their hard power is still rapidly increasing. They still are building more advanced jet-fighters than any other country in the word, building two new stealthy electric-diesel attack subs a year (soon to transition to nuclear subs), and are working on designs for two nuclear powered aircraft carriers to be completed in the next decade.

So yes, their economy is getting shaky, their neighbors are getting ever more pissed off at them, and the world and even its own citizens don't hold the Chinese government in high esteem, but they still have the military capacity to kick most of the worlds ass and give the USA the biggest slugfest it ever was in. Frankly, I don't know if we could win an offensive war against China.

But I don't want this to derail into a conversation on who would win in a war between China and the US. This is about power and power has many aspects. The article referenced focused mainly upon the economic and societal aspects of power, of which there are more components, for example geography. The control of the Himalayas gives China control over most of South Asia and SE Asia's water supply, something not to be trifled with.

The article was about China not living up to the assumption everyone has had that it would be the new superpower and replace the United States, or at least match it.

Reading between the lines a bit, falling short of that goal is even scarier than its success. What if there's a Tienanmen Square round two? Can't hide soldiers killing people in the streets when everybody's got an iphone. Even in the pretty good times China's still in there was the whole Bo Xilai mess this year. What if there are more power stuggles between officials? If China feels it's status slipping it might back North Korea especially strongly in a crisis out of pride or paranoia, leading to escalation.

China is not weak and never will be weak. But it could easily be unstable, and an unstable China mean problems for the whole world.

" I by no means am saying that Russia is a booming country, but unlike the US which is has been developed and over developed, Russia despite being in a hole and in bad economic shape has a lot of potential."

Potential while gas and oil is expensive and there are still Russians alive. Russia should be doing much better I agree, but Putin's kleptocratic regime keeps a ceiling on development in exchange for stability. Barring something on the level of the movement which toppled the Soviet Union Putin will get his twelve more years in power, with little changing. Russia will only have a chance to move forward once Putin is gone, and that won't be till 2024. 2042 if he and Medvedev pull the switcheroo again.

@ goldfinger

I think that if China randomly but deliberately attacked a large US base in the region today, say Okinawa, and killed thousands of Americans, the "sleeping tiger" (to borrow and paraphrase a Japanese commander's words, can't remember which one) would wake up and kick ass. A conventional offensive ground war in China is by no means an un-winnable proposition. The US Air Force would have complete control of the skies within 72 hours and the US Navy would have complete control of the sea as soon as all of our fleets show up, and that's half of the war right there.

Perspective. The US hit the worst recession in generations and the second-worst recession in national history in significant part because of the housing bubble.

China has a *city bubble.* Yes, it's kind of old news (2010), but still worth a mention in talking about China today.

http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-chinese-ghost-cities-2010-12?slop=1#zhengzhou-new-district-residential-towers-empty-7