[Castout]

I'm totally amazed how the heck did you guys win the cold war.

Better rhetoric?

Most Americans now are no longer passionate about freedom. Many of them I would consider a typical cowed people. Large proportion of the society are lacking simple common sense. Fundamentalism is rampant, some of which are religious, others are not. This shows in the lack of tolerance between beliefs. Wisdom you hate, foolish words you love to death. Large portion of the society want the US to go back to isolationism never realizing the place that the superpower state has in the global community.

If you guys are going downhill certainly you guys deserve it imo. It would just make perfect sense. No offense, this is my own personal observation.

As for China being a superpower I wouldn't count on it being a greater superpower than US even down 15-20 years from now. At most it will be a major regional power in terms of military. But politically speaking it will never command as much political and social influence as United States has in the past 50 years. Chinese movies anyone? Chinese law study anyone? China just doesn't have the social infrastructure and freedom its society needs to grow and develop as an advance society. A superpower needs a super society. China will need to reinvent its society and that will be impossible without reinventing and reforming its politics. China will never be willing to reform its politics. Thus China impediment to become a great nation will come from its politics. China will always have one of its foot in the bucket. It will be an awkward major power.

With global economic crisis China will be hit hard too. It still doesn't have a domestic market big and strong enough to dampen a slowing economic growth. This is simply due to the fact that the middle classes are still not the majority and those middle class households too depend on strong global economic growth. So China's long term fate is inevitably intertwined with the global economy outlook. One cannot become one of world's largest economy by solely depending on domestic market. You simply can't defeat global demand of manufactured goods. But still China huge population may help a lot but only if the majority of the population are middle income households. In other words how do you grow prosperity of the population without strong global demands? You need to grow local entrepreneurs and local businesses of medium to large size companies which rely heavily on domestic market. Tough job without strong global export demands to grow the middle classes. It's more like a long term goal than anything achievable in a short time. Having superior education too is a prerequisite. In short words, China needs to reinvent its people and their mindset.