It'll have 400 million people in an integrated single market, with the dominate culture in a liberal democracy. The rest of the world isn't actually ever going to learn Mandarin the way it has English. The language is far too difficult for that to occur and there's very little benefit to doing so. Which is also why that isn't happening right now despite China having the world's #2 economy. The growth of Mandarin outside of China is almost non-existent.

Liberal democracies in Europe are going to take their marching orders from an authoritarian dictatorship? Zero chance of that. China's system is fundamentally incompatible with liberal values, it will always cause an us-vs-them conflict.

China's authoritarian, repressive system will also not allow it to ever become culturally dominate. Few countries will accept the requirements that come with that pact. Just their lack of any gradient of free speech guarantees they can never become culturally dominate.

There are no other great powers in Western culture that can supplant the US. Germany, the UK and France are not suddenly going to increase their populations by 4x or 8x such that they'll become enormous powers with massive economies (and able to pay for a powerful military with global projection). Canada and Australia are also out of the running from the start due to that.

Japan hasn't had economic growth in decades and has a declining population with an even worse government debt situation than the US. They have no military of consequence. Nothing about their situation looks primed to change any time soon.

South Korea looks to have a potent future, however their population is far too small to become a superpower.

India has a GDP per capita of $2,000. Their biggest worry has to be getting caught in the low income trap, not even the middle income trap which is what China is about to get stuck in. India could do most things right and still not be a superpower 40-50 years later. It'll take two decades for them to catch up to where Russia is at today in global positioning when it comes to politics / influence / military, and Russia is now very far away from being a superpower.

So who else is left? Nobody. It's the US and China with everybody else a million miles away. Countries with liberal values - which is nearly every single high GDP per capita country - are all going to align with the US perpetually, so long as it remains on the liberal democratic side. That liberal alignment is political, economic and military. China has no real allies other than North Korea. Being a superpower without having all the advanced, liberal, rich countries as allies, leaves you as a paper superpower boxed in at every turn; whereas the US can project globally nearly at will precisely because it has so many alliances with other advanced, liberal, powerful nations.

>>There is just no way to compete.

We used to think the same about Japan. Japan reigned supreme in consumer electronics, motor cycles, cars ,and was taking large chunks of the mainframe market. It was 'obvious' then that Japan would take over the computer industry, in particularly with its statist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer

Just because we can't see now who will compete with China, doesn't mean nobody will.

China: 1.3 billion people.

Japan: 377k sqkm.

China: 9.56 million sqkm.

China is following exactly the same path as South Korea or Japan, but it's a huge country, not a medium sized one.

Somehow I doubt China will stop at regional power level, considering all its resources pretty much guarantee it being #1 in the world, by far, if they're managed by a half-decent government.

And nota bene, China has such a huge scale that it doesn't need to be fully democratic and fully developed to still be #1 by far. If the average Chinese citizen will produce half or one third of what the average US citizen does, the Chinese economy will still dwarf the US one, due to sheer population sizes.

On the other side, China is also raising its first generations of people born in middle class, who are starting to expect social government. From health care to the environment, to safe and comfortable jobs. We will have to see if those things will burden China as they burden Japan, the EU and the US.

China's population size is a game changer. If they manage to get most their people well-educated and contributing on the competitive stage, it's like comparing a GPU to a CPU. China has more honor students than the USA has students. At some point that starts to make a very real difference.

In the geopolitical space, it's not clear the analogy is on-point either. China can move quickly in some areas (e.g., staff up 100,000 manufacturing hands in a week), but it'll be much slower to adapt to foreign cultures and standards of civil liberties that are the norm in most western countries. For example, it's hard to imagine them developing a messaging app, or image analysis app that would convince U.S. users to trust and use.

It's not like China has been signaling a lack of interest in this area, quite the opposite.

The USA is going to increasingly interfere in China's progress through other means, like crippling the economy, effectively starving the GPU of amps. If it doesn't, things are going to get interesting real quick.

Not countering this policy early on was naive on behalf of US/European politics.

Thr flaw in the argument is that China essentially does not honor these protections. So if a foreign company invents something and wxports this knowledge to China, a purely Chinese run company will soon after build an essentially equal product without having to spend mony on any of the expensive R&D to actually develop that tech. This potentially ruinous asymmetry is not accounted for at all.