China: A Potential Superpower
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.