Reforms are key for China's rise as a superpower - Sara Hsu

Sara Hsu

Reforms are key for China to perform in terms of economic growth and developing into a superpower, says financial analyst Sara Hsu to ABC. The Belt and Road Initiative offers great prospects for the future, but still has to prove it is working, she adds.

ABC:

Economist Sara Hsu said that while China could be described as an emerging superpower, it has also recently slowed the pace of its many reforms that have been fuelling its growth. 

Dr Hsu said the changes being made were also insufficient to transform China into a real market-based economy to compete with the US and other developed economies, while adding that China's success with its Belt and Road Initiative is also yet to unfold. 

"If China is successful in spreading its soft power to other countries by helping them build viable infrastructure, this can boost China's status, but it will take time and hard evidence that China has what it takes to foster development partnerships in the global south," she said. 

But to be recognised as a true superpower, Dr Hsu said China needed to first reach developed-country status to earn the respect of other developed nations.

More at ABC.

Sara Hsu is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Will China be a global superpower by 2030? - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Is China going to replace the US as the global superpower in the near future? No, says China watcher Kaiser Kuo in SupChina. "Even if China and the U.S. continue to grow at roughly their current rates, China’s per capita GDP won’t have overtaken that of the U.S."

Kaiser Kuo:

No, China will not likely be the sole superpower on earth by the year 2030. Even if China and the U.S. continue to grow at roughly their current rates, China’s per capita GDP won’t have overtaken that of the U.S. If Chinese military spending continues at its current rate of growth as a percentage of GDP, even if the U.S. cuts back, it will still dwarf China in military spending. By almost any measure of ability to project military power globally, China will still likely lag behind the U.S.: It won’t possess nearly so large a blue water navy, will lag behind the U.S. significantly in long-range bombers, and will still have a nuclear force only a fraction of the size of the U.S.’s. Culturally, it’s very difficult to imagine that in only 12 years, China’s share of global cultural mind space will rival that of the U.S. 

China has only begun to actually think of itself as a superpower. I think historians will look back and see 2008 as an important inflection point, and 2017 perhaps as the year that (with Trump’s inauguration in January and Xi’s “New Era” enshrined in the Communist Party’s constitution) China’s arrival as a superpower was generally acknowledged. The U.S. may appear to be in decline, but it has a long, long way to fall. Probably never before in human history has one polity held the preponderance of comprehensive power — military, technological, economic, cultural — that the U.S. has held from the end of World War II to the present.

More at SupChina.

Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.