Rise of China

Will China Continue To Rise?

Rise of China

Rise of ChinaHow quickly has China risen?

The rate of China's rise has been blistering. When Deng Xioping opened China to the world in 1977 after Mao Zedong's death, China was a nation on bicycles whose GDP was less than 10% of the United States' GDP.

Over the next 30 years (1978-2008), China's GDP rose an average of 10.0% per year. In 2009, China's GDP rose past Germany's to become the world's third largest. In 2011, it rose past Japan's GDP to become the world's second largest. Today, only USA's economy remains larger than China's, or does it?

USA and China's 2016 GDPs were $18.6 trillion and $11.2 trillion, respectively. But goods and services cost less in China than they do in USA. Based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) that adjust for price differences, China's 2016 GDP (PPP) of $22.1 trillion was 19% larger than USA's $18.6 trillion. When the fact that 20-30% of China's economic activity is underground and unreported to the government is also taken into consideration, the true size of China's economy may already be 40-50% larger than USA's.

Is the rise of China likely to continue?

Consider the following:

-  China's current 6.5% GDP growth rate still far outpaces USA's 2.4% GDP growth rate.

-  While Europe drowns in debt and America strains under the weight of its $20 trillion national debt, now larger than its GDP, China has become the world's largest creditor nation, with over $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves.

-  While USA annually spends about $700 billion on defense, China spends about $180 billion on defense and spends the rest on its infrastructure, which already surpasses America's in some sectors. China's bullet train network, for example, is longer than the bullet train networks of the rest of the world combined. A 700 mile journey between two US towns without airports takes all day whether driven or flown and driven. A similar journey in China takes 4 hours in a comfortable bullet train and costs $60.

-  Chinese universities annually produce 4 times more graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields, considered the educational engines of modern economic growth, than US universities (1.3 million vs. 300,000 in 2016), and many of the graduates from US universities are Chinese (see CSSA).

-  By 2020, China will own about 20% of the world's data, which is the fuel for machine learning, which in turn drives advances in artificial intelligence.

-  China has the experience and the will to become a superpower. While the West sees China as a backward nation on the rise, China sees itself as the historically dominant power in Asia, if not the world, that is stirring from a relatively short 400-year nap to reclaim its traditional position atop the world.

-  China is a nation that is becoming increasing Christian (see Christianity in China). In the past 2,000 years, every nation that heeded the True Gospel prospered.

Continue...