Key Fact

Since Deng Xiaoping launched China onto its path of spectacular economic growth in the late 1970s, China has long been referred to as a rising global power. But that description is now outdated; China has risen. Its military has expanded at the fastest pace of any country since World War II. Its economy is expected to surpass that of the US in size during this decade, and in purchasing power parity dollars, China’s economy surpassed our own a few years ago. In the global forums that are rewriting the rules of the international order, China has recently been outmaneuvering the world’s democracies. We are thus a very different kind of superpower competition than that with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.