3 Reasons China Will Never Rule The World

Hello all. So, depending on how you measure it, 2014 may have been the year that the Chinese
economy surpassed the US economy. This is huge! We’ve been number one for over a century. Does that mean we should all start studying Mandarin to talk to our new bosses?I don’t think so. Here are three reasons why. The Chinese are kinda racist Over the past 10 years Chinese builders of infrastructure have done more for Africa than 100 years worth of Western do-gooders and missionaries. And the Africans hate them for it! Chinese companies bring their own workers, who keep to themselves, and conduct themselves with obvious contempt for the countries whose future they are building. In the West we at least pretend to treat everyone as equals. The Chinese are doing incredible good in the world, but until they change their attitudes no one will thank them for it. They will get better at this of course, but it will take time.

 2. Too many natural enemies There are around 1. 4 billion Chinese people, but they are surrounded by 2 Billion people,on their borders alone, who are super suspicious of any aggressive moves by China. We in the Us have been doing our best to piss the world off over the past 15 years, but we’d have to do a hell of a lot more to get China’s neighbors more worried about us than they're about them.

 3. The third-mover disadvantage. This one’s the most important. You guys know what a first mover advantage is right?In any field, the first entity to get there gets away with a lot, both in the amount of money made, and the way they get to set the rules of the game. When it comes to world dominance The British Empire was the first mover. Before the Industrial Revolution there wasn't a way for any one country to dominate the planet. The British took physical territory everywhere, for centuries in some places, and the world is still recovering from the savage mess they made of things. The US is the second mover. Even though we’ve headless real competition, and vastly more resources and manpower than the UK, we’ve managed to do much less with our time on top. Our two post World War II landgrabs have both been dramatic failures. We’ve certainly caused our share of damage, but we've always had to cook up elaborate justifications for our brutality. Forces like nationalism,international institutions, powerful visual media, and the public refusal to accept dead soldiers, continue to work to make overt empire impossible. The Chinese are already as constrained as we are. Over 50 years, and with 450 Chinese people for every Tibetan, China has failed to crush that country’s national aspirations. Imagine the British Empire having similar troubles with the Isle of Mann and you’ll get a sense of what a different world we live in. China will probably be the world’s most powerful country at some point, but it won’tbe able to be dominant we were. This is good news for everybody else, but it's great news for China. The US and China will never need to come into armed conflict, because the prize of top dog in the 21st century just isn’t worth having. If we work together, everybody wins. Washington, DC and Beijing don’t seem to have figured this out yet. It’s our responsibility to teach them.