Senior Fellow Arvind Subramanian's new book on China was featured in a Financial Times blog.
From the article
The United States is losing the economic race against China. Within 20 years, the Asian power will be dominant. What’s more, there’s nothing much that the US can do about it. It is China, not the US, that will determine the outcome of the race.
So argues Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, in a new and (it goes without saying) provocative book.
For a taste of Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, an article adapted from the book appears in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.
Whether consciously or not, the title of that article, The Inevitable Superpower, forms a striking parallel with China: Fragile Superpower, a book by Susan Shirk, a US academic-cum-diplomat, that was published four years ago.
So which is it? Inevitable or fragile?
To be fair, Subramanian is more nuanced than to say that China’s rise is guaranteed. He includes one rather large caveat: “China can radically mess up, for example, if it allows asset bubbles to build or if it fails to stave off political upheaval”.