30/10/2018 The Chinese century is well under way - A new hegemon

A new hegemon

The Chinese century is well under way

Many trends that appear global are in fact mostly Chinese
 Print edition | Graphic detailOct 27th 2018

W hen scholars of international relations predict that

the 2000s will be a “Chinese century”, they are not
being premature. Although America remains the lone
superpower, China has already replaced it as the driver of
global change.

There is one economic metric on which China already

ranks first. Measured at market exchange rates, China’s
gdp is still 40% smaller than America’s. However, on a
purchasing-power-parity (ppp) basis, which adjusts
currencies so that a basket of goods and services is worth
the same amount in different countries, the Chinese
economy became the world’s largest in 2013. Although
China is often grouped with other “emerging markets”, its
performance is unique: its gdp per person at ppp has
risen tenfold since 1990. In general, poorer economies
grow faster than rich ones, because it is easier to “catch
up” when starting from a low base. Yet in other countries
that were as poor as China was in 1990, purchasing power
has merely doubled.

China’s record has exerted a “gravitational pull” on the

world’s economic output. The Economist has calculated a
geographic centre of the global economy by taking an
average of each country’s latitude and longitude,
weighted by their gdp. At the height of America’s
dominance, this point sat in the north Atlantic. But China

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30/10/2018 The Chinese century is well under way - A new hegemon

has tugged it so far east that the global centre of

economic gravity is now in Siberia.

Because China is so populous and is developing so

quickly, it is responsible for a remarkable share of global
change. Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, for
example, China has accounted for 45% of the gain in
world gdp. In 1990 some 750m Chinese people lived in
extreme poverty; today fewer than 10m do. That
represents two-thirds of the world’s decline in poverty
during that time. China is also responsible for half of the
total increase in patent applications over the same period.

For all its talk of a “peaceful rise”, China has steadily

beefed up its military investment—even as the rest of the
world cut back after the end of the cold war. As a result,
the People’s Liberation Army accounts for over 60% of the
total increase in global defence spending since 1990. And
all of this growth has come at a considerable cost to the
environment: China is also the source of 55% of the
increase in the world’s carbon emissions since 1990.

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