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I don’t think China is likely to catch up with America. Their GDP growth rate is decelerating, their population is declining, and Xi seems to care more about his political security than economic growth, since he’s been snuffing out billionaires as rivals. Their GDP annual growth might realistically fall to 2% within 15 years. Considering their current GDP per capita is comparable to Malaysia or Argentina, and their GDP growth is stalling, I don’t see how they can catch up to the US. If anything, I predict the gap will grow wider.
Why do you think GDP is the relevant measure of catching up with America?
It’s more relevant than PPP, that’s for sure. China is a fairly poor country, comparable with Mexico or Argentina. People have been saying that China will “catch up” to the US for years, but it’s never panned out. It’s looking like China has peaked in terms of GDP growth rate, and they didn’t even manage to achieve a Japanese or South Korean level of wealth before doing so.
It being more relevant than another measure (why?) is not an argument that it is relevant in absolute terms, and the rest of your post seems to be another assertion that China's GDP is low. I find the continuous mention of GDP in these discussions about hypothetical military clashes very frustrating, because nobody ever explains why a measure that counts the number of tokens of socially constructed value exchanged for goods and services that mostly have nothing to do with military capability has anything with military capability.
At the extreme, a country that abolished money and markets completely, stopped exporting and importing and just press-ganged its people into producing sustenance and ordnance like an ant colony would seemingly have a GDP of zero, but clearly nonzero military power...? For a real example, Afghanistan's GDP appears to hover at around $20b per year. Total US expenditures on the war are given as around $2000b over 20 years, so why did the US lose? If you think Afghanistan was somehow exceptional and the US didn't fight for real but just wasted money on nation-building or something instead, a similar calculation holds for Vietnam where it's hard to find an argument that the US didn't throw everything that they could muster short of nukes at the North.
Coming from people who are ideologically committed to the token exchange system, the whole thing really winds up sounding like "the Albigensians stand no chance against our crusaders, since their Gross Devotional Prayer index as measured by our clerics has been way behind ours for decades", "Google stock is bound to prevail over Apple because their workforce is more diverse" or any other invocation of a metric that is about goodness as measured in terms of the speaker's value system, with the gap to the question at hand being implicitly bridged by the just world hypothesis (the arc of history must surely bend towards those with superior key market indicators/Christian devotion/wokeness).
We crushed Afghanistan: one of our easiest conquests, we lost about 13 guys conquering that country. Sure it was expensive to hold onto it for two decades, but conquering it was a cakewalk. Since we have no plans to conquer and rule China as imperial overlords, the occupation costs don’t really come into it: when it comes to winning battles, bignum GDP sure did crush nonum GDP like a bug.
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Probably depends on what you mean by catch up. China's economy is already more than 20% larger than the U.S. using Purchasing Power Parity. If we look at industrial production and exports, then of course China dwarfs the U.S.
China will probably not reach U.S. levels of per-capita GDP anytime soon. But they still have a clear path to a much larger GDP just by integrating rural peasants into the larger economy.
The rural population is aging faster than the urban population, is dramatically less well educated, and wages in urban China are rising too quickly to try a repeat of the world's cheapest workshop plan that worked in the 1990s.
There is still some steam left in that boiler, but not incredibly much and, once it's gone, it's gone.
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PPP is a bad indicator when you’re talking about strategic power, and it’s not even a particularly good way to compare relative economic power.
As far as integrating rural residents into the economy: they have. There are more Han twice as many urban as there are rural Chinese these days, and there’s a point where you hit diminishing returns on taking rural peasants and turning them into factory workers. At the moment China has a significant unemployment problem, and already “integrated” workers are having trouble finding jobs as it is.
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