[carboncopy]

Those are strange metrics of success you chose: number of cars produced annually, amount of public debt held.

I'd have gone with GDP, military strength, set of advantageous alliances, or some other measure of economic, military, or political power.

[cylinder]

China's alliances are with the youngest regions with big growth potential - much of Africa, Asia, Iran, and now central Asia and Latin America. US has hitched its wagon to the declining western Europe.

[noir_lord]

> has hitched its wagon to the declining western Europe.

We are declining? I wish someone had told me.

[jcoffland]

You read it wrong. It's cash in hand not public debt they have more of.

[carboncopy]

No, I read it right. It's American public debt they hold. They don't have 1 trillion dollars in cash sitting in a vault. They are holding U.S. Treasury bonds.

And again, I don't understand why having 1 trillion dollars in a reserve bank is a useful measure of economic power. The Chinese economy has a GDP of $10tn compared with the U.S. economy of $17tn. That is an example of a meaningful metric of power.

^^^ the parent commenter edited his entry after I submitted my original comment, which changes the relevance of my comment.

[StreamBright]

I think it is more like economic long term insurance than power.

[jcoffland]

They have $3.9T worth of cash reserves sitting in a vault in addition to holding over $1T in US debt.

[khuey]

No, they don't. There's only 1.4 trillion dollars in circulation.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm

[jcoffland]

Not all of their cash reserves are denominated in US dollars.

[khuey]

There's around 5 trillion US dollars worth of hard currency in the world. http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth 80% of it is not sitting in a vault in China.