As an American I often hear and see America bashing in my travels around the world.
China is now the number 2 superpower, but how many people would like to see China as number 1 ?
So, which would you choose to be number 1 ? America or China and why ?
I don’t see how anyone other than a Chinese person could pick China with a straight face. The U.S. may not be perfect but it is a good unilateral superpower in general. China has still got some serious issues in just about all areas. I would prefer they not become a superpower at all but it isn’t my choice.
Ditto. China is growing, economically, and good for them. But they have enormous hurdles to overcome to get to superpower status. Combine that with no ability to PROJECT military power and they are not yet playing in the bigs.
Structurally, they’re about where the US was in 1890-1910. The potential is there but it’s still just potential.
Given the state of human rights in China, I hardly think the question needs to be asked.
I chose America.
Cuz, like, I’m an American? Like, duh?
Now, or in 100 years? It would be hard to convince me that China is even third or fourth in line for the top superpower status currently. They don’t have a blue-water navy, and their military forces are decades behind the US and many European countries technologically speaking. Their ability to project military influence is pretty much limited to bordering countries.
Economically speaking, China is huge but not sophisticated (kind of like their military). Their GDP per capita is ranked somewhere around 90-100th in the world, and their industry is largely based on producing either a) low-tech “stuff” or b) high-tech “stuff” that has been developed and designed elsewhere.
The US is growing less perfect every day but is still a vast superpower.
China is amazing in so many ways but their government and economic system seem screwed up and unbalanced.
I am wondering who voted for China and why? I am as contrarian as anyone but I don’t see how China being the #1 superpower in the near term would be in the best interest of anyone in any way including the Chinese themselves even if it could happen. Let’s hear the well thought out logic and I hope it is more nuanced than U.S. = bad.
I’m not sure if having one superpower is a good thing. It probably is if it’s not an evil one. The US isn’t evil of course, but it does have this whole cultural and political imperialism thing going on. I’m not sure if China would bother doing that.
The only plus I see as an amateur to world politics is China is more pragmatic than we are becoming in the US. In the US our politics is run by lawyers who seem to want to govern more and more by dogma and partisan talking points. The Chinese are run by engineers and bureaucrats who seem to take the attitude of ‘whatever works’.
I’m sure that would spill over into international affairs, and China would approach international affairs with more of a ‘whatever works’ attitude while the US may be more run by partisan bickering or exporting philosophy. But who knows if that is true. Evenso, ‘whatever works’ also means ignoring the human rights abuses of trading partners.
But even with that, I don’t want China as a superpower. Their human rights record, environmental record and political rights record is not something I’d want exported.
Plus China is still mostly poor, 500 million still live on $2/day or less. They aren’t near being a superpower. They have 4x more people, but per capita they aren’t that impressive.
America! Fuck yeah! Number one superpower in the world yeah!
My second thought is that China is hardly a technological and scientific leader. The American’s contribution to the world of science and technology is simply incredible. China needs to step its game up big time if it wants to overtake the US.
On the whole, I like China, I’ve got many Chinese friends (My course is 99% Chinese) and I am reasonably fluent in their language(I can understand Chinese TV without subs) . I am a deep admirer of certain ancient Chinese philosophers and I believe the west can learn a lot from certain traditions they have.
Furthermore, I opposed the Iraq war, and dislike many aspects of mainstream American society and certain habits many Americans have, I also feel deeply insulted by their continued and unnecessary military presence in the UK and their hurtful portrayal of the British/English in the media. The behaviour of certain American multinationals is bloody appalling.
My Answer is simple.
USA#1 all the way.
[ul]
[li]People complain about American racism, but no one is restricted and controlled like the Tibetans/Uighurs.[/li][li]People complain about American xenophobia, but anyone can become American if they successful immigrate, noone would be able to be accepted as a non-foreigner in China.[/li][li]People complain about American militarism, but at least they don’t threaten to blow up the UK if it declares it is not part of the USA.[/li]People complain that Americans put their country first, and yes they do, but they don’t put their hatred and prejudice above their own self interest. Chinese are programmed from a young age to feel anger at the Opium wars and the Japanese invasion despite them being generations ago… I was badly discriminated against by Chinese because of this.[/ul]
Please note, I’m not Chinese. I voted for USA.
China is nowhere near ready to be a superpower. Although the country is nowhere near as fucked up as many people think it is, the government doesn’t respond to much popular sentiment. At least the USA pays some lip service to it.
Given the state of human rights in America, I kinda think it does.
However, as bad as things are, are getting, and can be reasonably expected to get in the not-so-distant future, they’re still nothing like as bad as China is and has historically been in the past, human rights wise.
The one thing China has going for it is… they’re pretty old. That culture’s been in place a long, long, looong time. If anybody’s in a position to rule for the long haul, it’s them. Because the long haul means integrating technology, and dealing with large crowds of people with limited resources, and ya gotta be ready for both if yer gonna rule the world.
America, at less than 250 years, is still very very unstable. In a sense, however, that’s kind of the point isn’t it, I mean Democracy (Republic) and all that. And right now, the way I see it, that kind of instability is causing all kinds of problems, and it seems that solving those problems is costing us dearly in terms of good ol’ human rights issues.
If we can get our shit together, by all means, my vote goes for America.
But if we can’t… well, it’s gonna be hell on earth for us liberal (in the freedom sense) types anyway, so China gets the vote just because they’ve got a much better track record.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but could you elaborate on how bad things “are, are getting, and can be reasonably expected” to be in the US with respect to human rights? You seem to suggest that human rights are getting worse and will continue to get worse in the future. Of course the US isn’t perfect/there’s always room for improvement, but surely it’s in the top 10% when it comes to human rights, probably the top 5%. I’m not baiting you for a debate, I’m really just curious as to what issues are prompting your pessimism when it comes to “good ol’ human rights issues.”
It’s interesting that despite having between three and four thousand years of continuous civilization, and for most of that time being among the most advanced civilizations on the planet, the Chinese have remained fairly unambitious about exerting influence. They’ve always been a very closed society, often with a deep mistrust of foreigners, but over the last 3,000 years haven’t really expanded their boundaries that much. Whereas western societies have constantly strove to increase their territory and export their influence, China seems to content to just make sure they’re getting by and left to do their own thing. Perhaps if they were the only superpower, they’d use it to ensure that other countries just left them alone.
Living here, I don’t see it that way. Sure, the culture had been thousands of years old, but then there was a massive reset during the Mao years. Although there are some cultural attitudes that are thousands of years old, in reality this country is only 20 years old or so, and trying to catch up fast.
Even within the Chinese Communist Party, there are factions that are nominally Maoist versus Modernists, and they all have their own, differing attitudes towards old culture versus new culture at the national level.
I’m not a China expert, but my gut feeling is that there’ll be an internal revolution within the government before there’s ever any hint of China truly being a world power.
China’s rich, and one might consider it a world power now. But as far as military capacity, they have nothing. Headcount doesn’t matter these days.
This isn’t even remotely a hard decision.
America, of course.
There was an article in The New York Times yesterday about how China thinks they will win the US-China rivalry, that “China views the United States as a declining power”.
Instead of asking, How do we get from here to there? (from a declining power to an equal world power) we should be asking, How do we get from there to here? (Working backwards, from 2225 to 2012.) And we know how to get to here. Reverse engineering, as it were. (Let’s hope game theory isn’t involved, though.)
I have some serious issues with the US; I mean, among other things, we’re infinitely behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to social policy, and internationally (like another poster indicated) we have this whole imperialist attitude that we should probably sort out. That said, yeah, the US gets my vote, really for many of the reasons stated above.
Not to hijack the thread, but this question brings me back to my high school history class. Man, it truly is downright incredible that the West as a whole became the leaders of the world at all in terms of power and technology and whatnot, given the superiority of the Chinese in those areas for the majority of human history. Seriously, if you look at the cultures comparatively, the medival Europeans were absolutely backwards next to the Chinese of that era; the fact that Europe would come to outpace China really shouldn’t have happened.
Food for thought.