America: The Real Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

One American view of China – now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd – is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. - Victor Davis Hanson

In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world's predominant power...

Yet even Beijing's miraculous 30-year leap out of poverty into first-world affluence and Westernized power is hardly the same as parity with the U.S...

• China has roughly four times the population of the U.S., but produces only about 60 percent of our total GDP. 
• A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one U.S. citizen accounts for 40 percent more goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts. 
• Americans enjoy a per capita GDP (roughly $95,000) over six times higher than China's (roughly $15,000)...