Quote from richardyu301:
China will be the biggest economy but definitely not the top if you agree that the biggest is not necessarily the best.
Even though I am a Chinese, I won't even count China in the top 3 category.
Actually I always feel that the US guys are over-sensitive of China's rise.
Having that said, China has been the most powerful country for a long long time right recent history. I can tell you that >90% Chinese are also not aware of this. But again, even in the past, China has most of its time being invaded or occupied by minorities or other countries. Only in 10% of its time it was the invader. But every time the invaders became assimilated. That is why the dynasties kept on expanding (b'coz the land expanded as the land of the invaders were included in the new dynasty).
So China's real power is to get invaded , survive, and assimilate the invaders instead of really actively going out to invade other countries.
Even nowadays the Chinese are the same. Chinese are quite famous of NOT being patriotic. Most of us hv a tendency to care much more about our day-to-day life instead of caring who our ruler is (even if he/she is a foreigner).
In WW2, most of the casualties in the Japanese army were actually Chinese. It is b'coz they wanted to survive and obey the orders of whoever was able to feed them. Of course, this is also a kind of lack of character...
