[Cola]

All of those articles and books kind of remind me of Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, first published in 1979 (according to Wikipedia). Look how that ended.

On the other hand, the sheer size of China's population (as well as India's) could easily enable it to overtake the U.S. and become the biggest economy in the world. But would China's economic dominance equal political and cultural dominance? Generally speaking, those three factors have gone hand in hand, but few countries (outside of the handful of communist ones that rely on China's support to survive) seem to be looking to China for anything other than economic opportunities.