Boastful predictions (or dire warnings) about the rise of China support an entire intellectual industry of China specialists, authors, and consultants. Indeed, China is an important country that gave rise to one of the world's most prominent civilizations, is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, boasts the world's second-largest economy, and is home to nearly 20 percent of the world's population. These superlatives are factually correct, but the language in which they are expressed often seems to tip over from the analytical into the apocalyptic. The most famous example of this is Martin Jacques’ (2009) self-explanatory When China Rules the World, but similarly extravagant viewpoints can be found in books by such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Hank Paulson, as well as many other, lesser stars. Callahan (2014, pp. 29‒31) suggests that the now-common characterization of China as a unique force shaping the course of human history constitutes a new form of orientalism, though one that associates the mysterious East with hidden reserves of power rather than unfathomable reservoirs of backwardness. It suggests that (Western) economic laws do not apply to China.

Those laws include the limits imposed by political, environmental, and demographic buffers that likely are already retarding China's potential rate of economic growth (Babones, 2011, pp. 84‒85). There is also the simple structural fact that that growing from low to middle income status is much easier than growing from middle to high income status. South Korea grew from one-thirtieth to one-third of US levels of GDP per capita between 1960 and 1990 – a growth trajectory even more remarkable than China's (Babones, 2011, p. 81). A quarter century later, it still has not reached half of the US level (World Bank, 2016). Despite 35 years of remarkable growth, China's GDP per capita is still less than one-sixth that of the United States. It may yet reach one-third. But to grow from there to parity – seemingly a minimum requirement to mark “the end of the Western world and the birth of a new global order,” as per Jacques’ (2009) subtitle – would require yet another wholesale transformation of China.