China or India to replace USA as superpower?

It's usually said that China will be the next superpower, and I don't discount this theory. But India is growing economically at a rate almost as phenomenal as that of 'the sleeping giant' of China. Both are nuclear powers with huge economies and space programs.

On January 11, China shot down a satellite, and I have little doubt that this was a military experiment and that India could do the same thing. A new phase of India's space program was launched in November, and, as I think it's pretty clear by now, the main motivation for any country to develop a space program is military. We haven't seen the USA establish mining on the Moon in the last few decades, for example.

India, I think, has one advantage in the superpower stakes. The Chinese, under threat of their huge population, have limited families to one child, but India hasn't done so. Two generations from now, rich India will likely have more young people than China, and China will have few young people having to care for an ageing population -- a real economic and military disadvantage for them.

One would hope that the next nation to take the position of global superpower will not be China, which is now encouraging capitalist enterprise in order to boost their economy (as Lenin did in the USSR in 1921, under the New Economic Policy), but which has not yet shown any deviation from the Marxist-Leninist ideology that led to so many scores of millions of deaths in the 20th Century, and so much torture, repression and suffering.

Meanwhile, I think it unlikely that in my lifetime I'll see the USA supplanted as the pre-eminent superpower.

See China's American enablers

Tagged: china, india, usa, space, nuclear, army, military