Senior fellow Arvind Subramanian's article on China's growing dominance was featured in The Business Times
From the Article
MARTIN Wolf, the Financial Times columnist, has used the term 'premature superpower' to describe China's unique ability to wield power despite being poor. According to my projections, however, by 2030, China will not be so badly off. Rather, its GDP per capita (in terms of purchasing power parity) will be more than half that of the United States and greater than the average per capita GDP around the world.
The road ahead: China, which is four times as populous as the US, will be a bigger economy as soon as its average standard of living (measured in per capita GDP) exceeds one-quarter of the US'. By some measures, this has already occurred, and as China continues to grow, the gap will only widen Still, China's economic dominance will be singular: unlike in the past, when the dominant powers - the United Kingdom and the US - were very rich relative to their competitors, China will be just a middle- or upper-middle-income country. And can a country be dominant even when it is not among the richest?
There are three plausible reasons for thinking that it cannot. First, a relatively poor country might have to subordinate its hopes of projecting power internationally to its need to address more pressing domestic challenges, such as achieving higher standards of living and greater social stability. Second, it might not be able to reliably raise the resources it needs to project power abroad. Military assets, for one thing, have to be financed, and poorer countries have more difficulty taxing their citizens than do rich countries.