China's rise to superpowerdom is imminent. In fact, they are already a superpower. But the scary thing is... They are just getting started. When I was little, there was always a saying in Taiwan that the 21st century is Chinese people's century. The way it is going... It looks like it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
Economics: What ISN'T made in China these days? The dependency on China's factories really started picking up in the 1990's... And I believe, has reached its apex . China's economy is vastly improving and therefore the labor rates... So businesses will start looking at new emerging economies to manufacture their goods, like South America, Africa, Southeast Asia... But the big turnaround is that China is approaching Europe and US's stratosphere both as a consumer market and investment source. Chinese state owned companies are buying up everything at a discount in this economy... Regarding these state owned companies... It's not really fair competition you know... People often say this and that company have the operating budget of a small nation... But in these cases, they are actually competing against a nation, and in fact, the most populist nation in the world... Communist Capitalism in China, as well as other economic models like Korea's state-subsidized corporations and Dubai's benevolent monarchy are certainly changing people's opinion about capitalism. Chinese has never been a big proponent of land conquest... But rather prefer culture invasions and trading agreements with other countries. What they are doing right now is nothing new to Chinese people.
What many westerners don't understand is that Chinese has always been the most greedy business people on earth. They are not just greedy, they are ruthless, from a billion dollar corporation CEO to the street vendors in Beijing. They try to make every last cent they can make out of you. It has been like this over not just centuries, but millenniums. Southeast Asians certainly know this... Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodians, Filipinos, and Indonesians... All have seen this first hand since the beginning. "Jews of Asia"... a term these Southeast Asians in the US have referred to Chinese as... They are still hated as much as Jewish people ever was in European history.
Diplomacy: Because China has a lot of extra money these days, they can afford to and they are being very kind to third-world countries money-wise. They are friendly with basically everyone in the world these days because of economic ties. Who doesn't want a piece of the Chinese pie? Communism is not viewed as the source of all evil anymore... because it really is not. It's a political theory that some people agree with and some don't. Certainly, individual and personal wise, you would not want to live in a communist country since you don't have as much freedom... But as a country, benevolent communists and monarchs are certainly efficient in going the direction they want to take... with our without your support.
Military: China is making no secrets about their military ambitions. They clearly want to be the biggest military power in the world. Ten years ago, no one in the world think that other countries can catch up to the US in terms of military technology. But... turns out, these days, US cannot even catch up to their own commercial sector in terms of technology and business processes. Most of the technical knowledge China needs to build up and modernize their military are widely available... And the places the military across the world has the most room to improve on currently - information technology - are basically all technology from the commercial sector.
As a second "virtual" world is built in the networked computers and servers of the cyberspace... Traditional physical boundaries between countries will have decreased meaning. World economics is already inherently tied to the Internet and will become the most important place of interest for every country. Defending your interests in the "cyberspace" will become just as important as defending your sea space or air space... So far, things on the web have mostly been commercially driven, but so did the European expeditions to the America and trading with India and China... There's really no guarantee that the cyberspace won't be a future battleground among nations. And with that in mind, their capabilities are not far behind the US. They are actually taking more of an initiative than the US in exploring IPV6.
Chinese Navy is also very ambitious these days. They are following UK and US's model of world domination - an Navy that they can mobilize and deploy anywhere in the world. For certain, they will be able to increase their influence on the Asian-pacific island nations as well as southeast Asia with a stronger Navy. If Taiwan and Singapore became under direct Chinese control and become big Navy hubs... China would own East Asia with only Japan standing in their way.
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