This is a layman’s big picture analysis of China’s power status.
It was brought upon by a throw away comment from a friend who, in mentioning that the US and China have each been getting the most medals, noted that it is funny how "superpowers compete through the Olympics."
China, however, only has the potential to be a superpower, as do some other nations, such as Japan and India. The following explains why.
There are at least three areas in which a superpower must be globally formidable: military, economic and political.
Economy
China’s economy is large and expanding rapidly. While this
rate of growth cannot endure forever, it is already placing it as the second
largest economy in the world. It has fingers in every continent. It has an abundance
of resources, and an abundance of the three fundamental aspects of an economy:
land, labor and capital (though the latter is not as guaranteed for them as
some other economies, as immense capital generation has its own set of
constraints).
There are some powerful differences between China and the
two superpowers of the last century, however. China’s economy is dominated by
exports. It cannot survive without them, because, like any export-driven
economy, its own people cannot consume all of its surplus. It literally must
export or shrink. This is not a problem for the US, and was not a problem for
the Soviets. A superpower’s economy cannot be so constrained and limited in
scope. China is currently working to alter this, but it will take time, and will
be difficult under the current global economic climate.
Military
Now, combine this critical conundrum of China’s economy to
the current state of the oceans. The US navy dominates the world’s oceans to a
degree unseen in the history of the world. Global trade is literally contingent
upon the US navy’s permission. In a war against China, the US navy could
catastrophically shut down their export-dominated economy by eliminating
critical sea travel. In a hypothetical WWIII with the Soviets, this would not
have been possible, as they were far more self-sufficient than China currently
is. For historical precedent: the real unsung heroes of the Pacific War were
the US submarines which destroyed Japan’s economy and its ability to continue
the war beyond a certain point. China has no counterstrike to this, or similar
tactic to use on America, despite many Americans' fears that China "owns
all our debt."
Any power that has this sort of disadvantage should probably
not be considered a superpower yet. There is a reason China has recently
focused so heavily on their navy. They know their problem and want to rectify
it. But it will take time (blue water navies with significant power projection
take more than a generation to produce).
Military analysts believe that the US could prevent China
from invading and conquering Taiwan, a tiny island right next door. China could
certainly invade and dominate adjacent, small, continental nations - but this
is well within the ability of a regional power, which is what China is.
China cannot militarily dominate significant nations at
significant distances. The US has consistently done this since becoming a
superpower; the Soviets consistently did so as well. The bottom line is that
China’s military, despite its fearsome size, simply does not have the
capabilities that the military of a superpower has.
Political
China’s political clout is heavy in some areas of the world.
But, its own neighborhood is fraught with nations that have the ability to
constrain it. By contrast, no nation in the entire western hemisphere can
ultimately constrain the determined political goals of the US – nor could the
nations surrounding the USSR.
The USSR had a great many lesser powers that it had
dominated militarily, and then pretended were in an alliance with them, called
the Warsaw Pact. The only real comparison of this to China is its relationship
with N. Korea. Though China could attempt to create its own version of a Warsaw
Pact, it is far from it, and there are significant barriers to its
potentiality. For example, Japan and India would move to prevent this – and
their aggregate opposition would probably be enough. There were never two countries
(or six or eight or twenty) in Russia’s neighborhood which could have prevented
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
China wants to, but simply doesn't have the sort of world
class political clout that an actual superpower wields.
