The only reason China dropped out of super power status was tremendous sabotage/criminality by the top 5 economies of the world.
There rise is not a fluke, this is an inevitability of the planet we live on, India is next and it will outperform China by the end of this century (like it did in the past, pre-British invasion).
General ignorance of world history in the West will make this transition harder than it needs to be for Western populations.
Bit more perspective. At the end of 1800’s and start of 1900’s China was still almost feudal agrarian society that didn’t modernise due to internal reasons. Neighbouring Japan had their Meiji restoration that made it a powerful modern country, that happily joined others in bashing China.
So at that point China was already decades behind Japan. After this came the Chinese civil war between Kuomingtang and the Communists, interrupted by Japan attacking again.
After the Communists won it spent the next 40 years shooting itself in the foot, again delaying its rise.
Comparable places like ROC (Taiwan) and South Korea have taken off like rockets economically, and are now great places in relation to their populations. China will be the biggest superpower if it reaches same production per capita as their non communist counterparts in Taiwan.
tl;dr:
China mostly shot itself in the foot repeatedly. First Qing dynasty then commies, pushing them back over a hundred years.
>Bit more perspective. At the end of 1800’s and start of 1900’s China was still almost feudal agrarian society
Starting in the 20th century? Skipping the first 100 years of Western criminality in China is like talking about the Titanic sinking and ignoring the iceberg it hit.
Western powers collapsed Chinese/Indian/African trade routes. An industrial revolution is great, but it works even better if you murder/colonize/enslave all the competition.
Western powers engaged in industrial espionage and stole trade secrets (Ex. Notice the countries with tea industries (the most consumed beverage on the planet)? Almost all didn't exist before this UK crime in the 1800s). In fact Chinese leadership even offered tons of free tea (one of the most valuable commodities at the time) to the UK if they could just stop producing poison (opium) around the world. The UK ended up stealing tea production secrets from China instead of accepting this offer.
Western power's "opium as a way to avoid trade deficits" policy not only led to countless murders and abuses but also led to 30% of the under 25 population being addicted to opium in China. Even worse, when this turned into an epidemic, Christian missionaries then started giving opium addicts morphine and promoting it as a cure (not a doctor but quite sure that is adding gas to a fire).
Western powers (primarily US) gave the Japanese authorization to expand West into Asia in 1905, after all the drugging they did for the better part of a century (Teddy Roosevelt was a douchebag and his wealth was mostly inherited drug money, unpopular historical fact). If you don't know why Pearl Harbor happened, it is because we reneged on this secret treaty with Japan and assisted China in the 2nd Sino-Japanese war.
The problem with popularized historical narratives (very true in the US especially) is they can be manipulated and mischaracterized for propagandizing effect. Economic history, on the other hand, cannot be played with the same way and what originally was characterized as exceptionalism now we can see is just criminality on an unprecedented scale. We can track most of the opium money, domestic and international trade flows, and economic outcomes of these countries during this period more accurately and thoroughly than using any other set of data points, like political speeches/rhetoric etc...
