China's Next Great Challenge: Scarcity

China will soon surpass the United States as the world's largest economy, but this is the least interesting thing about it.

Damien Ma and William Adams

The Atlantic - Sep 24 2013

The following is excerpted from the book In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade.
One Beijing morning in early November 2012, seven men in dark suits strode onto the stage of the Great Hall of the People. China’s newly elected Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping stood at the center of the ensemble, flanked on each side by three members of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee. It was the outside world’s first chance to take stock of the committee that will run China for the next decade—one that will mark many milestones. Under Xi’s watch, which is scheduled to last until 2022, China is expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. That moment when it arrives will likely lead many in the West to pontificate about the reshuffling of the global pecking order. Inevitably, they will breathlessly proclaim that having held the world’s “gold medal” for largest GDP since around the turn of the 20th century, the United States, will have to yield to China, the new “number one.”
That Chinese economic growth has been a success is beyond dispute. Since 2005, China has sprinted past Germany and Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. By the end of 2012, with a GDP preliminarily estimated at $8.3 trillion, the gap between China and number-three Japan in terms of economic output is as large as the entire French economy. Little wonder that “an American 20th century yielding to a Chinese 21st century” has become a popular refrain, as a flurry of commentators and authors argue that the world should prepare for the possibility that it will once again be centered on the Middle Kingdom.

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