America's unlikely to lose superpower status. You mean Hegemony (or sole superpower status), but American Hegemony will not end until someone is capable of challenging us all over the world. China has a lot of power, but a pitiful ability to *project* that power. Their investments in Africa are clearly a move, but their navy is downright pathetic (Russia still has much more power-projection capability, or even Britain and France, all of whom can get their power out there. China can't really reach outside their own bounds).

The only thing that will end American Hegemony is either if Russia grows more politically engaged in Africa and Latin America, or China does the same and really builds force-projection capability. Both of those could take a while.

Well according to the news Russia will no longer be a superpower too. They are passing the torch to china.

That's what I was going to say. It's kind of awkward to read.

OT: Whenever China surpasses us. Which seems not too far from now. 

I don't think America will ever go down the tubes totally, though.

The concept of "World Super Powers" is rapidly fading, instead being replaced by a 1 world power planet.

What I mean by this is the idea of rival nations is dying among the large scale nations of the world. We all are completely intertwined economically and socially and the loss of any of the major players would be a devastating blow to the rest. We live in a world where half the products we use on a daily basis come from somewhere else and instead of taking months to travel to other nations it takes hours

What you'll see over the next 50 years is a further move away from separate, opposing nations, and more of a movement towards a one world government

True. We are actually studying this in AP Human Geography. The UN is one of the first steps to a "United Government." (Which many people fear.)

America was not a superpower in the 19th century, not even in the 1st world war. Even if China surpasses USA, she will not have a cultural impact on the world as much as America did. English is a world language, the worlds biggest companies and institutions are located there, we watch and listen American movies and songs.

America today is a hard and soft power, China can only be a hard superpower, unless one of the Chinese languages becomes the most important one and we all watch Chinese movies.

However it did surpassed the British and the Qing empires as the world's largest ecomonies by then though. On the subject of cultural impact, I agree it's unlikely China will have a disrupting influence in the west but Asia is going to have the largest middle-class of the world in a decade of two, and they are probably going to be dominated by the chinese. You may not end up seeing the bulk of it, but it's going to be there, for hundreds of millions of people.

China isn't able to project power that well today, but they are taking steps to get a blue water navy, and they might expand their capabilities more if needed. When they are the world's biggest economy, they can afford to get whatever capabilities they need, same with India, and Brazil.

What I mean by america not being a super power is that we are going to go back to having lots of Great Powers, like how things were before WWII. America will be one of them, as will EU, along with China, Brazil, maybe Russia, and India.

Economically, probably 10 years from now. It could take 20 to 30 years for another super power to catch up to them on the military side of things.

i think by 2050, but i don't China being a world power at least not now that India is growing massively. I think there will be many regional powers instead, those being the European Union (if it somehow survives the recession!), China, India, Russia, USA, Brazil and possibly Mexico, OPEC members (if we still use oil by then), Argentina and Nigeria. Africa will probably be growing massively by then. America itself will not decline like the European powers did