The Sun
CHINA will blast the United States off the top spot to become the world’s top economic and military power within the next decade, experts have said.
As the ruling Communist Party marked the 100th birthday this week, President Xi Jinping, 68, said foreign forces attempting to bully China will “get their heads bashed” as he threw down a gauntlet to the West.
And the giant nation is on course to overtake the United States and become the biggest economic powerhouse, Professor Kerry Brown, of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, told The Sun Online.
“Economically, barring total disaster for China, it will be the largest economy some time in the next decade,” Professor Brown told The Sun.
“It will be a superpower with Chinese characteristics, meaning it will want a major space for its own ambitions, but it won’t want to take on leadership of the rest of the world.
“Relations look set to be pretty frosty for the future. It does not desire to become the West, or have the West become like it.”
It comes as China has boasted its success in tackling Covid – despite Western doubts over its claims amid allegations of a cover up – while the US has struggled with the world’s worst outbreak.
With a fierce speech in Tiananmen Square on Thursday, President Xi said the people of China would never allow any foreign force to “bully, oppress, or subjugate” them.
And meanwhile, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin also taunted the US this week and said the US’s dominance as the world’s number one superpower is “over”.
“Anyone who dares try to do that will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” he said, sparking applause from an audience of 70,000 gathered in the massive square in central Beijing.
Xi said the nation “must accelerate the modernisation of national defense and the armed forces” in order to “safeguard its sovereignty, security and development, elevating them to world-class standards”.
But China’s rapid military modernisation has fuelled growing concern among its Asian neighbours and in the West.
[China will] get the upper hand, both economically and militarily, on bilateral terms
Professor Ashok Swain
The People’s Liberation Army now has the world’s second-largest annual budget after the US armed forces and has been adding sophisticated new aircraft, showcased in a flyover at the start of the centenary ceremony featuring a squadron of China’s J-20 stealth fighters.
The country is enmeshed in a deepening rivalry with the United States for global power status and has seen recent clashes with India along their disputed border.
And China’s ambitions show no sign of dampening.
Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, believes China will “get the upper hand, both economically and militarily, on bilateral terms” in the next decade.
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