In Europe, the USA still makes the news far more often than China, so here we all have a "weird obsession" with the USA.
Based on what data?
Of the 31 provinces, direct-controlled municipalities and autonomous regions in China, three have already admitted falsifying certain economic data. Starting with the northeastern province of Liaoning in January 2017, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and the city of Tianjin have said their statistics were wrong.
Of the three, only Tianjing has admitted doctoring the overall provincial gross domestic product figures. Liaoning and Inner Mongolia had padded something else: their fiscal revenues.
In Liaoning Province tax receipts and income from various fees were padded by 20-30% according to counties and cities during the period of 2011-2014. Inner Mongolia has said that a quarter of the fiscal revenue stated for 2016 were actually fake.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Chi...
No, China is just a poor developing country with a per capita GDP of around $8k USD. That is just a small fraction of what US/EU achieved. Everything is just because of the huge population, but again that is not an advantage when the population is rapidly ageing.
Chinese communist party recently announced the goal to reach $12k USD gdp per capita in 2020, basically they want 1.4 billion people to work damn hard for the next 3-4 years to reach 20% of today's American GDP per capita level! To give you better understanding on this matter - US economy is growing 2.5%-3% annually in the last few quarters, with that kind of growth, in the same 2018-2020 period, US GDP per capita is going to add up to 9% and that new volume expected to be added is comparable to the entire Chinese per capita GDP figure.
Focusing on the total GDP and intentionally downplaying China's extremely poor per capita figure is not even politically correct - what can be individually achieved & enjoyed by those 1.4 billion regular Chinese are clearly far more important than a meaningless national GDP figure.
Depends what you're evaluating. If you're evaluating standard of living, yes. If OTOH you're evaluating the power potential of a country's government, then total GDP is more important than GDP/capita.
telling 1.4 billion Chinese to work their ass off for the next 3-4 years so China's GDP per capita figure can reach 20% of today's US GDP per capita is not impressive at any level. it is a solid proof that China is still damn poor after 40 years of economic reform.
there is no competition whatsoever - when Japan challenged America's economy in the early 80s, the GDP per capita figure of Japan was on par with the American one. We are now talking about an economy that is working day & night trying to reach 20% of America's GDP per capita.
A market bigger than US governed by a single political entity, that has the ability to control its citizen beyond the imagination of any western governments.
That is enormous power, and it comes in aggregate. US has been the biggest/smartest country to turn its internal market into a weapon. Now that China has it, it will surely use to same, if not greater extent, and that is what makes it intimidating.
By the way, American GDP per capita has been high because of many fortunate factors in addition to the quality of its people: abundant resources and huge productive landmass relative to population size; mostly intact from WW II; tech, talent, and institution transfer from Europe; etc. It is a great country but also a very lucky country.
I start to wonder why there is quite a bit of cynicism (it goes beyond skepticism at this point) by some commenters on China’s progress or likely progress, despite so much tangible evidence?