Is it inevitable -- or nearly so -- that China will overtake America as a world leader? If so, why? If not, why not?
Should China overtake America, what would be the consequences to other countries? What would you expect to see?
I am no firm or settled opinion on both issues.
I suppose anything is possible. Much of what has boosted China's standing in the world has largely been due to America's policies, particularly during the Cold War when America's policy was more anti-Soviet (or anti-Russian) than it was strictly anti-communist.
We were okay with communist Yugoslavia when they made their break from the Soviet Union, and China's break from the Soviet Union was also seen as an opportunity in the eyes of American foreign policy experts.
Nixon, for one, made inroads in improving Sino-American relations while further isolating the Soviet Bloc. Reagan also had friendly policies towards China, while calling the USSR the "evil empire." Moreover, even while the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact disbanded, and the Soviet Union officially dissolved, the U.S. still maintained friendly policies towards China, even despite the growth of the democracy movement which was crushed by the Tiananmen Square massacre - a wantonly brutal act which the U.S. government all but turned the blind eye to.
I also recall by the late 1990s that US media had gone soft on China, as exemplified by some media moguls (Murdoch of Fox News fame, Redstone of Viacom, Levin of Time-Warner) attending the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution. One journalist called it "one big icky fawning session." (Source:
In the Jaws of the Dragon - page 265)
We could have pushed further and tried to isolate China, particularly due to their human rights abuses, but the allure of high profit potential from China made that a non-viable option. Capitalists wanting to make more money took precedence over any principles.
https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/2000_11_mirsky.pdf?x78124
Some Western newspaper proprietors ensure that criticism of China will be restrained. Of these the most well-known is Rupert Murdoch whose positive views of China in the interest of his commercial interests there are a matter of record. After dropping the BBC from his Star television network in Hong Kong and selling the extremely profitable South China Morning Post, Mr. Murdoch observed that he didn't wish to irritate Beijing because of the opinions of some of his newspaper editors. He blocked the publication of Hong Kong ex-Governor Chris Patten's East and West - despite a contractual obligation with Mr. Murdoch's publishing house HarperCollins - because, he observed later, he saw no reason to anger the leaders of a country where he was an investor. During Mr. Murdoch's visit to Beijing in December 1998, President Jiang Zemin congratulated his guest for presenting China objectively and cooperating with the Chinese press, while Mr Murdoch expressed his admiration for China's achievements in all respects over the past two decades.
As the East Asia editor of Mr. Murdoch's The Times for five years, I observed the impact of the paper's owner on how it covered or did not cover China. Mr. Murdoch, however, is not alone. At the Fortune-sponsored CEO's meeting in Shanghai in September 1999, Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom and a prospective buyer of CBS, said at a news conference, "Journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis. ..that doesn't mean that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate."24
As a result, the US and other Western media didn't want to "unnecessarily offend" China, especially since US companies were making enormous profits from both selling to China as well as utilizing their large but cheap captive labor force.
And this goes all the way back to the Clinton Administration, which itself was the subject of controversy from being seen as too friendly to China, along with allegations that China funded and supported the Clinton campaign.
So, if China is any way a "threat" to America or our position in the world, it's only because multiple administrations, along with numerous US corporations, made it that way. Some people might suggest that all of this goes along with Mao's original perception of the US as a "paper tiger" and the idea that communism could ultimately defeat capitalism without firing a shot. Tempted by the love of profits and the enormous wealth to be gained, US political and business leaders threw caution to the four winds in regards to our policy towards China.
As a result, we're now more vulnerable and in a position where China could conceivably overtake us as a world leader.
America's only real hope at present is to try to build stronger relations within our own hemisphere, and let China and Russia have the eastern hemisphere. We don't need to interfere or intervene in the eastern hemisphere anymore. We still have enough strength to be a respectable regional power, at least enough so that the eastern hemisphere will leave us alone. But as far as America being a world leader - those days are over, and the sooner we come to realize this, the better off we'll be.
