Author: Jon Rosen
First published: USA Today, 28/02/2011
Will the 21st century belong to China? Three decades after the adoption of enterprise capitalism, China is on pace to become the world’s largest economy, returning to the mantle it occupied from antiquity until the early 19th century, when a conservative bureaucracy drove it toward isolation while industrial revolution dawned in Europe.
With the developed world burdened by debt and reeling in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, an ascendant China is rapidly gaining clout, leading a cadre of emerging-market nations to the geopolitical fore.
But does China have what it takes to upend the United States as a global superpower? Author George Magnus, a senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank in London and one of the first to predict the global financial crisis, says no….. more