Does China Have What It Takes to Be a Superpower?

But being a regional great power isn’t the same as being a global superpower—a concept first used to describe the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Here’s one definition:

“A ‘superpower’ is a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemon,” writes Alice Lyman Miller, China scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a former CIA analyst.

That requires excelling in multiple areas of power projection: economic, military and “soft” (political and cultural).

China’s people, the sheer number of highly motivated workers moving off the land and into the urban economy, have been the secret to its extraordinary success until now. But because of the former “one-child policy,” that source of growth is likely to disappear soon. According to United Nations projections, China’s 1.4 billion population is likely to decline sharply, beginning as soon as 2023.

Both to boost the long-term prospects of its own economy and to extend its influence, China has embarked on what is probably the most ambitious foreign investment campaign in history. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative extends from China to Western Europe and other parts of the world by land and sea. It performs some of the functions of Washington’s large foreign aid budget, but more than that—it has the potential to create longer-term revenue, ties and dependencies. Even if China’s leaders don’t want to become the next global superpower, the need to promote and protect such widespread investments could yet take them there.

The most remarkable part of China’s military modernization is just how affordable it has been, even accounting for a large suspected underreporting of defense spending in official statistics. As China’s defense spending has risen from around $19 billion in 1989 to $228 billion today in 2016 dollars, the cost as a percentage of GDP has barely changed, probably remaining below 2 percent. As a share of government spending, the burden imposed on China by its defense budgets has actually fallen to a third of what it once was.

In some areas, like the number of heavy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) it either has or exports, China has overtaken the U.S. already. Its navy is growing fast, too. By focusing in areas such as attack submarines and missile technology, China has been able to alter the balance of forces with the U.S. at relatively low cost. However, in terms of the big-ticket items—such as aircraft carriers—China would need to project force around the globe and it has a long way to go. And many of the new Chinese platforms remain untested in action, making it difficult to assess how great a threat to U.S. ships or aircraft they would in reality present.

When it comes to the ultimate, nuclear deterrent, though, China remains a bit player compared with the U.S. or Russia. China has shown more interest in developing an edge in new technologies—such as hypersonic missiles, cyber and artificial intelligence—than in trying to match nuclear stockpiles left over from the Cold War.

The same is true of military bases. The U.S. Department of Defense says it operates 516 military installations in 41 countries around the world, including 42 that are large or medium-size bases. China established its first official overseas base in Djibouti last year. In the East and South China seas, however, China enjoys a home-base advantage, and it is gradually extending that strong presence into the Indian Ocean.

A defining aspect of U.S. superpower, which emerged from the Cold War division of the globe, is the extensive network of alliances it enjoys. These range from the 29-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the 1951 Anzus pact with Australia and New Zealand, plus a number of bilateral military agreements with countries like Japan and South Korea, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance between the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. China still has few formal allies, even within Asia.

Peacekeeping is another noncoercive way to project influence around the globe. From playing almost no role in United Nations peacekeeping missions 20 years ago, China is today the largest troop contributor by far. It also pays more than 10 percent of the UN’s total budget—more than any country besides the U.S., which pays 28.5 percent.

Soft and political power rely in part on a superpower having a well-resourced corps of diplomats to get its message out around the globe and cajole countries into line with its interests. China has a relatively small, if well-regarded cadre of diplomats. Their numbers are growing, and their budget for next year has increased by 15.6 percent, about twice the rate of increase for defense. As a result, the budget for foreign affairs will have doubled since Xi came to power in 2013. At about $9.5 billion, though, that remains well below what the U.S. spends—even if President Donald Trump got his wish to cut the State Department budget, including USAID, from $55.6 billion in 2017 to $37.8 billion in 2019.

China certainly will be one of the world’s greatest powers, with an outsize influence in shaping the 21st century. But whether it overtakes the U.S. as a superpower remains in question; it seems likely, at the least, that it will take China more time to get there than its extraordinary growth over the past 20 years would suggest. A declining and aging population looks like the biggest risk to Xi’s ambitions. When the U.S. was in a similar position, emerging to overtake Great Britain as the world’s dominant superpower, from 1880 to 1950, its population tripled.