The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world. Lee Kwan Yew.
How many times have we been told recently, ‘we must compete with China’? Are the editors, scholars, and officials urging us unaware that we lost the competition in 2020?
China played by our rules and, in 2020, beat us on our home turf. Beat us scientifically, socially, militarily, governmentally, diplomatically, and economically.
In 2020 we had more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides, executions, more homeless, poor, illiterate, and imprisoned citizens than China–flat out, not just per capita. But wait, there’s more.
In 2020, China's infant mortality hit 5.4/K, to our 5.69/K and their life expectancy surpassed ours, and their kids started graduating high school three years ahead of ours in STEM subjects and producing six times more engineers.
2020 was China’s goal for making vagrancy obsolete by giving everyone a home, sometimes for free. Home ownership was ninety-eight percent in 2020, fifty percent higher than ours.
In 2020, China also took the lead in quantity and quality of published scientific papers.
And 2020 welcomed the world’s first exascale computer, literally an order of magnitude faster than anything in existence. Beijing has since delivered two more, and has seven under construction. To be quantum securely networked, eventually.
Next chapter: our diplomatic meltdown.
You forgot to mention homicides,
In 2018 the USA had 16,214 a rate of 4.96/100k, China had 7,525 a rate of 0.53/100k.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country