Gideon Rachman: When China rules the world

According to Gideon Rachman, there is still a long road ahead for China to rule the world, even though China is now more plausible than the past cases with Japan and the former USSR.
"Previous challengers to postwar American supremacy – Japan and the Soviet Union – eventually fell by the wayside."

China is a more plausible challenger according to Gideon Rachman: "In some ways, China is clearly a more plausible challenger than Japan. Japan’s population is about 128 million, China has 1.3 billion people. There are roughly four times as many Chinese as Americans."

But China still faces two very difficult transitions – economic and political, argued Gideon Rachman. Although neither is easy, the more difficult one will be the political one.

See:
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/When-China-rules-the-world-pd20090915-VVTW2?OpenDocument&src=sph The original appeared on Financial Times: FT.com.