China may still lag far behind the United States in total gross domestic product, but that’s not how most Americans see it. According to a new Gallup survey, fully 50 percent of Americans view China as the world’s leading economic power; only 37 percent of respondents think of the United States as number one.
Perhaps that’s why Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has made such an issue of China in his presidential campaign, and why economically beleaguered Americans are evidently responding to it. Indeed, Trump’s pledge to fight Chinese trade abuses is arguably a more prominent feature of his campaign than his well-covered anti-illegal immigration stance is. And it’s also a long-standing position. While Trump is something of a johnny-come-lately to immigration hawkishness, he has been railing against trade deals with China for years.
Bizarrely, although most Americans now see China as the world’s leading economic power, Gallup finds that “more Americans [predict] that the U.S. rather than China will be the world’s leading economic power in 20 years.”
That, of course, is entirely backwards. While the U.S. economy still dwarfs China’s, should general trends remain the same, China should surpass the United States to have the world’s largest economy by GDP well sooner than twenty years from now. So, not enough American are reading the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. Or perhaps they just think that President Trump will tame China and succeed in Making American GDP Great Again.
