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China to overtake US as world’s top economy in 2032

China is expected to surpass the United States to become the world’s largest economy in a little more than a decade, despite escalating hostilities with Washington, a Beijing-based governmental think tank has forecast.

The prediction, made by researchers at the Development Research Centre (DRC) of the State Council, the Chinese government’s cabinet, reflects mainstream assumptions in Beijing about the success of the Chinese government’s new development strategy of focusing more on its domestic market, given the intensifying economic, technological and geopolitical rivalry with the United States.

The report also underlines a big assumption in China that the country’s economic rise is unstoppable.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed on Monday that China must “speed up” the new

“dual circulation” strategy he introduced in May, given that the external environment has become volatile and hostile.
According to the group of researchers led by Chen Changsheng, who oversees macroeconomic research at the government-run think tank, disputes between China and the US will intensify further in the next five years.
“It can’t be ruled out that the US will use all possible methods to contain China’s development, including imposing financial sanctions on Chinese companies by misusing its ‘long arm’ jurisdiction [to impose US law outside America’s borders], seizing China’s holdings of US Treasury securities … coercing other countries to impose technology embargoes on China, as well as excluding China from the [US]

dollar payment system,” according to the report.
However, even those factors cannot stop China’s economic rise, the report suggested. The country’s share of the global economy will rise to 18.1 per cent in 2025 from 16.2 per cent in 2019, while the US share will drop to 21.9 per cent from 24.1 per cent in the same period, the researchers predicted.
Last month, Justin Lin Yifu, a professor at Peking University and the World Bank’s former chief economist, predicted that China would surpass the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030.
However, there are also views that China may never surpass the US to be No 1, due to the former’s ageing population. Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that, from a demographic point of view, China would not be able to surpass the US in the foreseeable future.