By Bilawal Hammad
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According to Graham T. Allison, China and the US are locked into Thucydides Trap. Graham Allison has described Thucydides trap as a political situation in which an emerging power threatens to replace an existing power as an international hegemon. The United States of America has been an established hegemon and is being threatened to be replaced by the rising power of China.
Political power and economic prowess are two important components of any nation’s foreign policy. China is flexing its muscles by increasing its soft and hard power along with its economy. China is developing through leaps and bounds and is a genuine contender to challenge the hegemonic ambitions of the US. The US is well aware of the threat that China is posing and is actively thwarting the excesses of China in the last decade or so.
The UK-based Center for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) said that the Chinese economy will overtake the US by 2028 due to the pandemic of COVID-19. The CEBR releases its report every year on 26th December. The report says that China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy by 2028 which is five years earlier than previously predicted by the same institution. The report said that China’s efficacious management of the pandemic of COVID-19 as compared to the US and European nations will lead it to robust and sustainable economic development.
China is tipped to be the only major economy in the world that is to grow in 2020. As we all know that China was the first nation in the world to be affected by the global pandemic of COVID-19. But, China took stringent and effective measures to control the spread of the virus. In this manner, China avoided the repetition of economically paralyzing lockdowns that the US and many European countries had to deploy repeatedly. As a result, China was the only country in the world that had avoided a recession in 2020. Hence, China is expected to grow by 2% per annum in 2020 and is the only major economy in the world that will expand in 2020.
On the other hand, the United States of America has been hit hard by the pandemic of the Coronavirus. There have been more than 18 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US and more than 3,30,000 deaths have been reported. The policymakers in the US had tried to overcome the economic impact of COVID-19 by effective monetary and fiscal policy framework but it was to no effect as the US was not able to come out of the economic crisis. According to the CEBR report, the US economy will respond very strongly in 2021 and will grow by 1.9% annually from 2022 to 2024.
As per the report, the US economy will slow down to 1.6% per annum in the post-2024 period. Whereas, the CEBR ( Center for Economic and Business Research ) report has forecasted that China will grow by 5.7% per annum by 2025. The Chinese economy is expected to grow by 4.5% annually from 2026 to 2030. The CEBR report also says that China’s share in the world economy has risen from 3.6% in 2000 to 17.8% in 2020 and will move on to be become a ‘high-income country’ by 2023 keeping in view the growth strategies that Chinese policymakers are deploying by focusing on advanced manufacturing.
While concluding, we can infer from the above discussion that China is a reality in this 21st-century multi-polar hegemonic world. China is now a serious threat to the United States of America and will soon take over the US, as far as the economy is concerned. The United States of America must vary of China’s ambitions and ameliorate the economic policy framework to keep up the pace with them.
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