Is it the start of a new world power?

China's trajectory from developing economy to global superpower competitor has been one of the defining geopolitical stories of the early twenty-first century—a rise accomplished at a speed and scale without precedent in economic history, producing strategic implications that the international order built on American primacy is still absorbing.

The economic facts are unambiguous. China surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest economy in 2010. Its manufacturing output now exceeds that of the United States in many categories. Its infrastructure investment, particularly in transportation and energy, has transformed the physical capacity of a country that was predominantly rural and agrarian forty years ago. Three hundred million people—a population larger than the entire United States—have been lifted from poverty since 1978.

The strategic implications are more contested. A country of China's economic weight will develop commensurate military capacity and political influence; the question is what it will do with them. China's approach to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, its Belt and Road infrastructure investment across Asia and Africa, and its assertive diplomacy on Taiwan represent a pattern of behavior that the American foreign policy establishment has moved from engagement to competitive framing in describing.

The internal contradictions matter as well. An authoritarian political system managing a market economy of continental scale, with a middle class large enough to have expectations about governance and prosperity, faces pressures that have historically been destabilizing. Whether the Chinese Communist Party can continue managing this tension while simultaneously projecting external strength is one of the central questions of the coming decades.

New world powers do not announce themselves with clean transitions. The process is contested, uneven, and full of reversals.