It’s easy to win a race when you’re the only one who knows it has begun. China is thus on the way to supplanting the US as the global hegemon, creating a different world as a result. Yet it doesn’t have to end this way.” This anxious view comes from The Hundred-Year Marathon by the Hudson Institute’s Michael Pillsbury.
Mr Pillsbury is one of the most influential American thinkers on US-China relations. The book is more than a call to recognise reality: it is a call to arms. On one central point Mr Pillsbury is certainly right: China’s rise is the great political event of our times. Getting the response right is crucial. It is so easy to get it wrong. Today, I fear, the US is getting it frighteningly wrong.
The starting point must be that, whether or not China has a plan for world economic domination by 2049 (the 100-year anniversary of the creation of the People’s Republic), that is a plausible, though not inevitable, outcome. Other things being equal, population is decisive in determining the size of an economy. The US is the most powerful high-income country because it has the biggest population, by far. But the population of China is to the US’s, roughly what America’s is to Germany’s. Nobody could now imagine a world in which Germany’s economy is comparable in size to that of the US. Similarly, why should we imagine that the US economy will remain indefinitely comparable in size to that of China?