Super Trooper?

John Pomfret asks (rhetorically) whether China is the next superpower. He knows China well, certainly far better than I, and concludes that the answer is no.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.

Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

After reading his reasoning, I concluded that his reasoning stunk worse than China's demographics. The real reason China is not the next superpower is that it is already a superpower - not the number one superpower, but surely number two.

Pomfret is obsessed with China's demographics. He thinks it will be the first country to get old before it gets rich, and blames the one child policy. As it happens, just over 43% of China's population is under thirty. The comparable figure for the United States is 41%. For Japan, it's about 32%. Mr. Pomfret's concern for China maybe overstated, at least compared to its major competitors.

The flaws he finds in China's economy don't find any concrete incarnation in his story, except in the fact that "Kung Fu Panda" was inexplicably released by Hollywood instead of Beijing.

China has real problems with its environment, but they aren't alone, of course.

Overall, I don't think Pomfret's story is worth the french fries its printed on.