Does China Have What It Takes to Be a Superpower?

By Marc Champion and Adrian Leung

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As the U.S. well knows, it’s expensive to be a superpower. The costs of maintaining a large military, leading diplomatic missions and providing aid to foreign countries all add up. The more China extends itself around the globe, the heavier the burden will be. While the country has deep pockets, there are economic and financial challenges at home, and if things go belly up domestically it could put strains on President Xi Jinping’s ambitions. As the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in “The Art of War” two and a half millennia ago, “first count the cost.”

So a key question for China is: What kind of great power does it want to become? Surely, China wants to dominate in Asia, its backyard. At that regional level, projections of the Middle Kingdom’s economic growth, population size and defense spending suggest it will have outstripped the U.S. by 2030.

China Is Projected to Overtake the U.S. as a Regional Power in Asia by 2030

Index of GDP, military expenditure and working age forecasts

But being a regional great power isn’t the same as being a global superpower—a concept first used to describe the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Here’s one definition:

“A ‘superpower’ is a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemon,” writes Alice Lyman Miller, China scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a former CIA analyst.

That requires excelling in multiple areas of power projection: economic, military and “soft” (political and cultural).

Economic Power

China is already an economic superpower. At purchasing power parity, which adjusts the value of a dollar for what it can buy in a given country, China now has a larger economy than the U.S. The gap is only likely to grow, given that China has far more people making and buying things, and they’re likely to get richer than they are today.

Just looking at the scale of an economy in terms of what it can buy domestically may be misleading, however. Superpowers buy military bases, influence and goods abroad. The high-tech stealth fighters they purchase have an international price. The dollars that China invests through its Belt and Road Initiative to connect with markets around the world are just dollars, with the same purchasing power as anyone else’s. One way to measure how much extra buying power China has on the global market each year is to look at its GDP growth in current dollars, unadjusted for inflation or purchasing power parity. That paints a different picture.