| | | >> in the 21st Century, China will be what the USA was in the 20th, and the British in the 19th.
I really doubt that.
I am not saying that China will not be a force to be reckoned with, but I don't see them having a chance to be a dominating superpower as the US, UK, Spain, etc were.
For starters, a unified China is a historical anomaly. This doesn't get advertised in the west, but maintaining a harmonious society across so many diverse cultures, languages, etc is the primary concern of the Chinese government...and it is not an easy task. Furthermore, the demographics are not on their side.
And to make the matters much worse, since China is not an open society, it lacks many of the pressure valves and adaptation mechanisms that Americans take for granted.
Nor does the Chinese government really want to oust the US off its perch. This is the most misunderstood thing about China in the US. They certainly want to be independent of US pressures, but that is not the same as wanting to dominate the rest of the world. Doing so not only goes against 5000 years of history and is culturally incongruent, it also brings about a slew of internal headaches that the Chinese government prefers to do without. Unfortunately, the US is pushing China to do the very thing that the US is afraid of.
Anyways, as I look at the global trends, I don't think any single country will be as dominant as we've had over the past 200+ years. The world is likely to splinter along several blocks as has been the norm for most of history (e.g. you had the China, Persian, Rome, and Egypt coexisting for long stretch of time. More recently the Ottomans, Moors,Mughals , and a whole bunch of Europeans all had overlapping reigns). Tha is the normal state of affairs, BWDIK. |
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