China's economy was expected to grow larger and surpass the United States at some point in any case, but that's going to happen sooner rather than later because of the Trump regime's intentional incompetence.
The coronavirus pandemic has wounded the economies of most western countries and particularly the United States, but that was not the case for China and other Asian nations that imposed stricter measures to slow and ultimately stop the virus.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research now estimates that China's economy will overtake the United States in dollar value much sooner than previously expected.
From Bloomberg:
The world’s biggest and second-biggest economies are on course to trade places in dollar terms in 2028, five years earlier than expected a year ago, it said on Saturday.
In its World Economic League Table, the consultancy also calculated that China could become a high-income economy as soon as 2023. Further cementing Asia’s growing might, India is set to move up the rankings to become the No. 3 economy at the end of the decade. [...]
“Typically, we compare ourselves with other Western economies and miss out on what often is best practice, especially in the rapidly growing economies in Asia,” it said.
This is largely because of Trump's deliberate and intentional choice to do virtually nothing about the coronavirus, but it also struck me that this is going to happen even after Trump waged a two-years-and-counting trade war on China.
Conservatives and even some Democrats have rhetorically supported Trump's trade war because of China's growing economic influence, they say, but their influence is only going to grow stronger and eventually larger than our own and it's going to happen sooner rather than later because of Trump.
The trade war has been a failure by virtually every other pre-pandemic metric. Our goods trade deficit widened to a new all-time record high in November according to a Census Bureau report released last week, we're still losing over 700,000 jobs every week, prices are higher, and manufacturing has gravitated toward other nations to escape Trump's tariffs.
I get that impression that this is just one of the first points of data we're going to see this year that will tell us just how far the Trump era has set us back. And he's the GOP's favorite president ever now. The biggest failure ever is their model of success.
It's more likely that a future Republican presidential candidate will call for war with China to contain their influence before they will ever consider tackling it in far better ways like simply passing universal health care and higher wages. Conservative ideology is the real reason we're falling behind.