China outwits America

China has successfully launched its lunar spacecraft Chang’e-5 on the moon which not only placed its men on the surface of the moon, hoisted Chinese flag on the moon and brought back from lunar surface as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples on 19 th December 2020. Though China’s space race took its start much later than U.S. yet it accomplished its mission flawlessly by surprising the entire world. The fantastic economic progress of China leaving behind even the U.S was already in news. For several years, China could not catch up the U.S in its space race, which landmark has now been achieved by her.

Earlier The United States and the Soviet Union competed for supremacy during the space race in the 1960s and ’70s. Now China is in the fray, and today’s competition — once seemingly the realm of science fiction — has become a solid reality today.

The first two Chang’e spacecraft were orbiters that circled the moon. Chang’e-3 landed in December 2013, and China joined the United States and Soviet Union as the only nations to make a successful landing there. In January 2019, Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon. Its rover, called Yutu-2, is still operating, studying lunar geology nearly two years later. China is now the only country to land successfully on the moon in the 21st century, and has done it three times.

The history of the U.S.-People’s Republic of China relationship has seen many twists and turns. Their rivalry started from the outbreak of the Korean War. In the ensuing Cold War, China under Mao Zedong’s leadership was far more antagonistic toward the United States than the Soviet Union. The great split in the Communist camp following the Sino-Soviet border conflict in the late 1960s paved the way for Sino-American rapprochement which brought both the countries closer to each other as good rivals. The U.S. still sees China as its chief rival. But this rivalry due to their competition in Indo-Pacific region has become quite sour.

Measured by the more refined yardstick that the IMF now employs is the single best metric for comparing national economies, which shows that China’s economy is one-sixth larger than America’s

The end of the Cold War brought about a phase of economic accommodation between the two, and China was integrated into the global multilateral trading system. However, issues like the third Taiwan Strait Crisis, American criticism of human rights in China, and the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, created discord between the two countries. As long as the western world remained threatened by terrorism since 9/11, China serenely kept improving its economy. In the beginning of the 21st century, China began to emerge as a strategic threat to the U.S. grand strategy.

With the spread of recent Covid-19, the relations between U.S. and China became strained. The U.S. has accused China of covering up the origin and seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and manipulating multilateral bodies like the World Health Organization to defend its botched handling of the outbreak. The United States is trying to fix blame on China for the spread of this pandemic.

In July 2011, due to the active diplomacy of China, all important countries like Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam agreed to a set of guidelines which were to help resolve disputes of sea trade in the South China Sea. This was regarded as a milestone for smooth sea trade between China and the ASEAN Member States.

The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 brought a point of departure in the international system that dented U.S. influence and gave more space for China.

Developments including the new Sino-Russian strategic alliance, China’s approach to countries like Iran and Venezuela that have their own animosities with the U.S., and Beijing’s spearheading of multilateral organizations representing the Global South are all signs of a shifting balance of power in China’s favor. During the days of Obama administration ties between them started becoming closer. With the rise of Donald Trump, the stage was set for a more animated rivalry. China reacted with unparalleled assertiveness against Trump’s increasingly vocal attacks on China on economic, technological, and strategic fronts.

On the physical side China wields by far the world's largest military, with 2.8 million soldiers, sailors and airmen—twice the American number of forces in 2020. On land, China has 33,000 armored vehicles and 3,500 tanks. Their Air Force has amassed 1,232 fighter aircraft and 281 attack helicopters. China is estimated to spend $237 billion on its arm.

The U.S. also leads the world with 39,253 armored vehicles, 91 Navy destroyers, and 20 aircraft carriers. It has an estimated 1,400,000 active personnel, and allocates $750 billion to the U.S. military budget in 2020.

Trump launched a trade war with China. On another front, he taxed the steel and aluminum of U.S. allies. And he terrified America's own corporations by threatening to wreck $1.4 trillion in annual trade with Mexico and Canada.

It is believed that Biden’s foreign policy will on the other hand give more attention to human rights issues than the demands of geopolitics. The new government may take up issues concerning suppression of human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong to show to the world the wrongs done by China.

According to a recent report of IMF, China has now displaced the U.S. to become the largest economy in the world. Measured by the more refined yardstick that the IMF now employs is the single best metric for comparing national economies, which shows that China’s economy is one-sixth larger than America’s (i.e Chinese $24.2 trillion versus the U.S.’s $20.8 trillion). Traditionally, economists have used a metric called MER (market exchange rates) to calculate GDP. The U.S. economy is taken as the baseline. This method adds up all goods and services produced by their economy in their own currency and then converts that total into U.S. dollars at the current “market exchange rate.” Recognizing this reality, over the past decade, the CIA and the IMF have developed a more appropriate yardstick for comparing national economies, which is called PPP (purchasing power parity). As the IMF Report explains, PPP “eliminates differences in price levels between economies” and thus compares national economies in terms of how much each nation can buy with its own currency at the prices items are sold to them. While MER answers how much Chinese would get at American prices, PPP answers how much Chinese will get at Chinese prices. This is the right yardstick to compare national economies.