Japan: 126 million people.

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.

To reinforce, China is already expanding its influence around the world, picking up low hanging fruit in countries the west has neglected in Africa and probably elsewhere. I don't think Japan ever had those opportunities.

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.

I'm not sure if Japan and China can really be treated as similar in this light.

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.

The GPU and CPU comparison is interesting. Of course, a specialized GPU can do a handful of operations far more quickly, but a CPU is far more flexible and can adapt to changing needs. In the processor world, not sure the GPU will necessarily win out.

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.

The area of most concern from my perspective as an American is how long the USA maintains its military superiority operating as a relative CPU, should China focus its massively parallel GPU on advancing its military tech?

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.

and Japan did take 100% of US TV/VCR market.