Peter Turchin turns his structural-demographic analytical eye on the rising 21st century power. But can he gather sufficient reliable data for the analysis?
As the American Empire continues to disintegrate from within, the most likely next hegemonic power is going to be China. The size of China’s economy has already exceeded that of the US (measured in PPP terms).
In other forms of social power, military and ideological/soft power, China still lags, but is gaining on America. For example, Chinese movie industry produced quite a number of world blockbusters, starting with the 2000 epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek, “If we consider a list of 100 world blockbuster movies in the last decade, what would be the breakdown in terms of countries producing them?” They gave similar answers. USA, of course, dominates, with >80% of world blockbusters, but China is the second, and fastest-growing, contender. ChatGPT estimated its influence as 5-8%, while DeepSeek (predictably) gave a higher estimate of 10-15%. In any case, China has a long way to go yet.
Whether China continues to gain, and eventually overtake America on these dimensions of power will depend a lot on its internal cohesion and stability. Thus, an empirically based and theoretically sound forecast is clearly needed.
On the other hand, it is not yet clear to me whether my team will be able to collect all the necessary data. We will find out.
It’s good to see more people are finally branching out from the obvious decline of the West and beginning to pay attention to the rest of the world.