One of the most popular dinner party conversation topics is the possibility that the United States will be joined or even surpassed as a superpower by another nation, such as China.Let usassess the what makes a superpower, and what it would take for China to match the US on each pillar of superpowerdom. Two years ago, in May 2006, I wrote the first version of this article, and it became the most heavily viewed article ever written on The Futurist. The comments section broughta wide spectrum of critiques of various points in the article, which led me to do further research, which in turn strengthened the case in some areas while weakening it others. Thus, it is time for a tune-up on the article.

A genuine superpower does not merely have military and political influence, but also must be at the top of the economic, scientific, and cultural pyramids. Thus, the Soviet Union was only a partial superpower, and the most recent genuine superpower before the United States was the British Empire. Many Europeans like to point out that the EU has a larger economy than the US, but the EU is a collection of 27 countries that does not share a common leader, a common military, a uniform foreign policy, or even a common currency. The EU simply is not a country, any more than the US + Canadacomprise a single country.

The only realistic candidate forjoining the US insuperpower status by 2030 is China. China has a population over 4 times the size of the US, has the fastest growing economy of any large country, and is mastering sophisticated technologies. But to match the US by 2030, China would have to :

1) Have an economy that matches the US economy in size. If the US grows by 3% a year for the next 22 years, it will be $30 trillion in 2008 dollars by then. Note that this is a modest assumption for the US, given the accelerating nature of economic growth, but also note that world GDP presently grows at a trend of 4.5% a year, and this might at most be 6% a year by 2030. China, with an economy of $3.2 trillion in nominal (not PPP) terms, would have to grow at 11% a year for the next 22 years straight to achieve the same size, which is already faster than its current 9-10% rate, if even that can be sustained for so long (no country, let alone a large one, has grown at more than 8% over such a long period). In other words, the progress that the US economy would make from 1945 to 2030 (85 years) would have to be achieved by China in just the 22 years from 2008 to 2030. Even then, this is just the total GDP, not per capita GDP, which would still be merely a fourth of America's.

The subject of PPP GDP arises in such discussions, where China's economy is measured to a larger number. However, this metric is inaccurate, as international trade is conducted in nominal, not PPP terms. PPP is useful for measuring per capita prosperity, where bag of rice in China costs less than in the US. But it tells us nothing of the size of the total economy, whichcould be more accuratelymeasured in commoditieslike oil or gold. Nonetheless, in per capita GDP, the US surpasses any other country that has more than 10 million people (andis thus too large to rely solely on being a tax haven or tourist destination for GDP generation). From the GDP per capita chart, we can see that many countries catch up to the US, but none really can equal, let alone surpass, the US. An EU study recently estimated that the EU is 22 years behind the US in economic development. The European Chamber of Commerce estimated that the gap between the EU and US was widening further, and that it would take 75 years for the EU to catch up to the US. Again, these are official EU studies, and are thus not 'rigged by America'.

The weak dollar leads some who suddenly fancy themselves as currency experts to believe/hope that the US will lose economic dominance. However, we see from this chart that the US dollar comprises a dominant 65% of global currency reserves (an even greater share than it commanded in 1995), while the second highest share is that of the Euro (itself the combined currency of 21 separate countries) at just 25%. Furthermore, the Euro is not rising as a percentage of total reserves, despite the EU and Eurozone adding many new membernations after 2001. Which currency has any chance of overtaking the US, particularly a currency that is associated with a single sovereign nation? The Chinese Yuan represents under 2% of world reserves, and China itself stockpiles US dollars. Clearly, US dominance in this metric is enormous, and is not dwindling in the forseeable future.

2) Have a military capable of waging wars anywhere in the globe (even if it does not actually wage any). Part of the opposition that anti-Americans have to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is the envy arising from the US being the only country with the means to invade multiple medium-sized countries in other continents and still sustain very few casualties.No other country currently is even near having the ability to project military power with such force and range, despite military spending being only 3% of US GDP - a lower proportion than many other countries. Mere nuclear weapons are no substitute for this. The inability of the rest of the world to do anything to halt genocide in Darfur or other atrocities in Burma or Zimbabweis evidence of how such problems can only get addressed if and when America addresses them.

3) Create original consumer brands that are household names everywhere in the world (including in America), such as Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonalds, Citigroup, Xerox, Microsoft, or Google. Europe and Japan have created a few brands in a few select industries, but China currently has almost none. Observing how many American brand logos have populated billboards and sporting events in developing nations over just the last 15 years, one might argue that US cultural and economic dominance has even increased by this measure.

4) Have major universities that are household names, that many of the worlds top students aspire to attend. 17 of the world's top 20 universities are in the US. Until top students in Europe, India, and even the US are filling out an application for a Chinese university alongside those of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or Cambridge, China is not going to match the US in the knowledge economy. This also represents the obstacles China has to overcome to successfully conduct impactful scientific research.

5)Become the center of gravity for all types of scientific research.TheUS conducted 32% of all research expenditures in 2007, which was twice as much as China, and more than the 27 combined countries of the EU. But it is not just in the laboratory where the US is dominant, but in the process to deliver innovations from the laboratory to the global marketplace.To displace the US, China would have to becomethe nation that produces the new inventions and corporations that are adopted by the mass market into their daily lives. From the telephone and airplane over a century ago, America has been the engine of almost all technological progress. Despite the fears of innovation going overseas, the big new technologies and influential applications continue to emerge from companies headquartered in the United States. Just in the lastfour years, Google emerged as the next super-lucrative company (before eBay and Yahoo slightly earlier), and the American-dominated 'blogosphere' emerged as a powerful force of information and media. Even after Google, a new batch of technology companies, this time in alternative energy, have rapidly accumulated tens of billions of dollars in market value. It is this dominance across the whole process of university excellence to scientific research to creating new companies to bring technologies to market that makes the US innovation engine virtually impossible for any country to surpass.

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