just substitute China for Kaiser. Our sun is setting, theirs is rising. Another sleeping giant awakes.
People have been predicting China's emergence as a superpower since the days of Napoleon, who purportedly appreciated China's potential as a world power and cautioned against waking the sleeping dragon. China's subordination into the Western international system in the 1839-1842 Opium War and its decline as the "sick man" of East Asia for the rest of the nineteenth and for the first half of the twentieth centuries dulled, but never extinguished, the expectation that, sooner or later, China would again dominate the world.
Several recent events have provoked the latest announcements of China's looming ascent to superpower stature and have suggested that these long-held expectations are, at long last, coming true. In October 2003, China launched its first human into space, joining the United States and the former Soviet Union as the only countries to have done so. American media have recently taken notice of China's efforts to expand and diversify its access to sources of oil in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and unsettlingly close to home Canada. The world's industrial economies, including the United States, have inferred from the giant sucking sound created by lost manufacturing jobs and from the flood of Chinese exports into their markets that China is becoming the world's manufacturing hub. Meanwhile, analysts ponder the implications for global security of China's military modernization effort, now two decades long, and its promise to develop a "revolution in military affairs with Chinese characteristics."
As portentous as the events may seem, there are good reasons to be skeptical that China will achieve superpower stature anytime soon. By all measures of international power, China has a long way to go to rival the power in international affairs of the United States in the manner that the Soviet Union did.
In terms of its economy the size of China's GDP makes it a member of the world's industrialized economies but it is still a long way from economic superpower stature. China's economy expanded 6.8% in the fourth quarter of 2016, the latest official data available. For the full year, China's GDP grew 6.7%, the slowest in 26 years.
In each of the first three quarters of 2016, China posted a consistent 6.7% increase in GDP, raising doubts about the veracity of the figures. Earlier this week, local authorities in China's northeastern Liaoning province admitted to inflating its GDP figures from 2011 to 2014, as officials sought to advance their careers. Chinese banks extended a record $1.8 trillion of loans in the past year, as the government used more credit-fueled stimulus to meet its growth target, exacerbating debt levels in the economy.
The International Monetary Fund earlier lifted its forecast for China's GDP growth in 2017 to 6.5%, citing continued policy stimulus. But capital outflows, debt, and geopolitical uncertainties will be the major risks for China's growth this year, the IMF noted.
The national statistics agency also released a slew of other economic data on the same day. Among them, China's fixed-asset investment, a key gauge of construction activity, went up 8.1% in 2016 from the year before, the slowest full-year expansion since 1999.
China lacks a genuine central bank and national banking system, and the accelerating growth of its energy demand places uncertainties on long-term economic growth. Meanwhile, China's population is graying, and as the bulge of people born during Mao's heyday ages, they place heavy burdens on the smaller subsequent generations of Chinese born in the 1980s and after. In some measure, China's current wave of industrialization replicates the industrial cycle pioneered by the United States, then followed by Japan, and then by South Korea and Taiwan as they shifted away from heavy industry toward lighter, more efficient and environmentally less intrusive industries and services in earlier decades. And China faces competition from other rising centers, including India.
Since 1989, defense allocations in China's public state budget have risen at double-digit rates. China is developing a new generation of strategic and tactical missiles, some of which are deployed on the Chinese coast facing Taiwan. China is building a much more capable navy and has bought advanced aircraft from Russia.
But these military modernization efforts are targeted at the needs of specific conflict scenarios. They do not appear to reflect an effort to acquire the strategic and power projection capacities of a superpower.
For China to change the balance of military power in Asia decisively, a number of things must happen. First, China's dramatic economic growth must continue indefinitely, a prospect about which there are grounds for skepticism. Second, China's neighbors must stand still in their own defense modernization efforts, which so far has not been true. Third, Russia must continue to be willing to sell advanced weapons systems and military technology to China; sooner or later, however, one might expect Moscow to reconsider how much farther it can aid the advance of China's military capacities without jeopardizing Russia's own security interests. Finally, the United States would need to draw down from its security commitments in the region, a development that also does not appear likely.
By all of these measures, China is not now a superpower, nor is it likely to emerge as one soon. It is establishing itself as a great power, on par with Great Britain, Russia, Japan, and, perhaps, India. China is today a serious player in the regional politics of Asia, but also is just one of several. At a broader level, in global affairs, its stature and power are growing, but in most respects it remains a regional power, under the dominance, however momentary, of the United States.
China's rise over the past two decades has been spectacular from any perspective and deserves attention and respect, especially in view of the difficult course of China's attempt to adapt to the modern world since the nineteenth century. So Napoleon, in that regard, may be right, but not yet and not soon.