The Inevitable Superpower: Why China's Dominance is a Sure Thing
![handle is hein.journals/fora90 and id is 842 raw text is: The Inevitable Superpower
Why China's Dominance Is a Sure Thing
Arvind Subramanian
TO DEBTORS, creditors can be like dictators. Governments in financial
trouble often turn to the International Monetary Fund as supplicants,
and acting at the behest of its own major creditors, the IMF often
imposes tough conditions on them. After the Asian financial crisis
of the late 199os, Mickey Kantor, U.S. trade representative under
President Bill Clinton, called the organization a battering ram,
because it had served to open up Asian markets to U.S. products.
During the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States threatened to withhold
financing that the United Kingdom desperately needed unless British
forces withdrew from the Suez Canal. Harold Macmillan, who, as the
British chancellor of the exchequer, presided over the last, humiliating
stages of the crisis, would later recall that it was the last gasp of a
declining power. He added, perhaps in 200 years the United States
would know how we felt.
Is that time already fast approaching, with China poised to take
over from the United States? This is an essential question, and yet it
has not yet been taken seriously enough in the United States. There,
this central conceit still reigns: the United States' economic preeminence
cannot be seriously threatened because it is the United States' to lose,
ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute
for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development.
This article is adapted from his forthcoming book Eclipse: Living in the
Shadow ofChina' Economic Dominance (Peterson Institute for International
Economics, 20n). 0 Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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The Inevitable Superpower: Why China's Dominance is a Sure Thing
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