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. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American powerhouse.
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. In truth, President Donald Trump held almost all the cards at the recent summit and will do so again when Xi Jinping visits the U.S. this autumn. According to nearly every historical measure of power, the U.S. leads China by sizable margins.
China has roughly four times the population of the U.S., but produces only about 60% of our total GDP. A crude way of looking at this asymmetry is that one U.S. citizen accounts for 40% 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).
We are the largest oil and gas producer and exporter in history; China must import 11 to 12 million barrels of oil every day. The U.S. is also the greatest food exporter in history; China, for all its miraculous increases in agricultural productivity, still must import 30% to 40% of its food.
The U.S. still spends almost three times as much on defense. Its nuclear forces are roughly six times larger, and its 11 carrier strike groups are nearly four times more numerous than China’s three conventionally powered carriers.