>#2 is kind of meaningless when they are the #1 largest country by population and most countries are tiny by comparison.

That would be meaningless if having a citizen was an asset of more or less standard economic worth regardless of country.

But countries can have 10x or 100x as many citizens as others without having the 10x or 100x the same GDP -- in fact they could do much much worse than the other country.

Compare e.g. Nigeria with Japan or Ireland.

I can see that argument for a new country, but the PRC has had ~70 years to shape it's citizens into productive members of society. AKA people retiring year old today where completely educated under communist rule. So, what it has today is an outgrowth of what it was teaching people 60+ years ago down to today. Look at how quickly Japan or Taiwan etc industrialized and the farmers to factory workers to researchers transition can be very quick.

The direct comparison between Nigeria and Japan or Ireland is relevant simply because of how incompetent past Nigerian governments have been.

Wait, so it’s a bad thing that they have more people? How does it make them any less powerful?

PPP is metric, good for comparing certain things. I wouldn’t think that, for the purposes of determining which is the greater power, less population would be more beneficial as long as the total economic output is greater.

I don’t think total ‘power’ is a useful metric for comparing countries leadership. An incompetent farmer with 10x the land will likely grow more food than a competent one. That says little about who you should seek advice from.

>An incompetent farmer with 10x the land will likely grow more food than a competent one.

Would they? An incompetent farmer could very easily produce nothing even with 10x the land too.

In this analogy growing food like GDP is the easy part. A successful harvest aka what people actually care about is harder.

I don't want to sound like I am dumping on China. The US/etc housing boom was a boost to GDP largely due to low interest rates, but because the assets where poorly allocated the long term value creation was well below what the economic activity suggested. Building something is a critical first step, building something useful that's worth the maintenance and replacement costs is vastly more difficult.