China is within $5 trillion of American GDP and will overtake the US to become the world’s leading economy once again this decade with the potential to rapidly accelerate this year in 2025.
For the majority of ancient history, the Chinese ruled the world with the highest GDP. They established the Old Silk Road, the earliest form of globalisation, and pioneered countless inventions from paper, to silk, to the compass as far back as even 8,000 BCE overseeing a golden age of peaceful international relations.
The Chinese Century is beginning to manifest in the Chinese Fourth Industrial Revolution.
China leads the world in renewable energy capacity, 5G base stations, blockchain patents, electric vehicles, high-speed rail, smart cities, and drones to name a few of the technologies of the future.
Furthermore with the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative and the exportation of the Chinese Fourth Industrial Revolution along the Digital Silk Road to the developing world, global history is very much at a pivotal cross-roads where the balance of power will shift decisively to Asia and the East and come full-circle having shifted from China to the West in the Industrial Revolution.
India will become the second biggest economy in the world by 2075 by GDP and by 2050 by PPP overtaking the US. China and India led the ancient world in a peaceful partnership for much of world history accounting for a majority of global GDP whilst Russia, with all that experience for Xi to lean on, was India’s natural and controversial ally in the Cold War. Already seen in the BRICS and the Belt and Road, this emerging trident is the stuff of Cold War alliance nightmares for the US.
The single greatest foreign policy mistake by the CIA in history will be investing in China instead of India in the 1970s. The US rather erroneously concluded in order to win the Cold War it could seduce and convert isolationist Marxist China to democracy and dominate its domestic market under the ‘Open Door’ principle. The Chinese instead used $1 trillion of American investment since its re-opening in the 1970s to bide their time before going rogue under the Belt and Road Initiative (2013) and Made in China Policy (2016).
The Western Financial Crisis of the late 2000s appeared to shatter the US’ unipolar world that had been painstakingly achieved after decades of the Cold War through the collapse of the Soviet Union. China would effectively bail out the Western financial system, particularly the Eurozone, and perhaps more alarmingly for America began to reveal its own vision for a New World Order led by China with the Belt and Road Initiative and the Made in China Policy confirming domestic control of AI.
The US responded with the beginning of the Trade War and a calculated assault on China’s global reputation through Hong Kong and Xinjiang as well as reigniting the long-term goal of a ‘free’ Tibet before the unleashing of arguably the CIA’s greatest masterpiece; Covid.
In spite of the CIA’s Covid chessboard, $1 trillion invested in global infrastructure under the Belt and Road for example has brought high-speed rail to Indonesia facilitating becoming the world’s fourth largest economy by 2050, the construction of the world’s most futuristic smart city in the New Cairo and the fourth largest solar power plant globally helping Egypt become the seventh largest economy by 2075, and South America’s first continental railway catalysing Brazil becoming the world’s fifth largest economy by 2050.
From AI to Electric Vehicles to Virtual Reality, the Digital Silk Road will achieve historic speeds of development for the rest of the world that will enable Asia to have half of the world’s top 30 leading economies by 2030 as a wider Asian Century takes hold.
China has just committed $50 billion to BRI projects in Africa – the highest since Covid – and will make the continent a larger manufacturing export market than Western Europe by 2030 showing ultimately the folly of tariffs against electric cars and solar panels as they accelerate Africa’s development along the Digital Silk Road and China’s long-term plan to restructure the global economy around the developing world.
Brazil, with a middle class over 100 million and future global top 5 economy by 2050, is now the world’s largest importer of Chinese electric vehicles. De-coupling is very much by design as part of China’s strategy and the world may become even more economically divided than the old Cold War with just the West v the Rest.
Unlike in the Western Financial Crisis, due to the geopolitical ramifications of the Trade War (in reaction to the Made in China Policy and Belt and Road Initiative) and Co-vid (and the subsequent Ukrainian War), as one of US federal debt’s largest creditors at almost $1 trillion, the Chinese will not be bailing out the Federal Reserve (and wider Western institutions) this time in the imminent American financial collapse from 1929 levels of stock-market overvaluations and a return to 20% interest and inflation rates of the 1980s, unless there are substantial reforms brought about, and the United States’ financial collapse may well be part of its strategy in the accelerated creation of a New (Asian-led) World Order.