http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aRD273wFLs

i seen this video nw.

is china really rising like this? they r saying its economy will be double us economy by 2050

thn important investors are tellng us to teach our kids mandarin.

do u thnk this is all media hype or is china going to be th dominant country ov the world like british empire was in 19th century, usa in 20th century. is 21st century chinas?

China has a whole host of problems all their own. While Mandarin is going to be important for business, it's more the case that it, like other non-Western-European langauges, is criminally underrepresented in much of our schools (and i'm talking private colleges here. My own has a far more robust Italian program than Japanese, Russian, and Mandarin combined), and it's not going to be so over-dominant.

The Chinese government is in an interesting post-totalitarian phase, and is pretty much a pure bureaucracy at this point. While they've played post-totalitarianism far smarter than the Soviet Union did, and lack most of the Union's old economic problems, China's got similar structural issues boiling under the surface, stuff that their government plans to buy off, but these issues will be reckoned with before China can properly take over the world. The most they could hope for at this point is a Cold War style two-power parity system, but China more has to worry about the other BRIC countries, especially the two that are its neighbors, before it can worry about grappling with the USA for dominance.

probably yes

Why would the west be doomed by China? Looking at how things are going, it could become a mere shadow of it's former self (declining population, overwhelmed by immigrants etc.) in one century or so, but it will be their own fault.

Plus I doubt China will ever be that big. It will surpass the USA one day, yes, but not double it's economy. Lots of useless land compared to USA or Russia for instance, population  already aging, too few nukes, contradictions within it's own political system and so on. It is just impossible for the world to become unipolar like it was on previous centuries.

Yes, they will rise.

No, the west won't be doomed.

The cost of labour in Asia  is considerably cheaper than the developed world.  There is no surprise at all that the trend of more jobs being outsourced: skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled from the developed world to Asia. More western world  jobs are being outsourced to Asia and lots of cheap imports from Asia are sent back to the western world nations. It is far more cost effective for multi-national companies to outsource jobs to foreign labour markets that cost only a fraction of the price. IT, accounting, engineering, factory and agricultural jobs, etc are being outsourced by companies in record numbers to overseas markets. The trend will continue for developed nations to lose more jobs as the developing world gains more jobs. The financial downturns are engineered by the governments and the banks  to increase the trend of more jobs being outsourced to Asia that save more companies on labour costs.

Western world nations may soon be forced to accept lower wages in line with Asian pay rates. Some of the developing Asian nations have a poor track record on human rights. No political rights and no social rights granted to employed citizens. The minimum wage in the US is around $10, in China and in other Asian nations it is around $1 per hour. The financial downturns are engineered by the governments and the banks  to increase the trend of more jobs being outsourced to Asia that save more companies on labour costs.

Minimum wages in Europe nations are considerably higher than the US. The cost of employing people in Europe is too expensive for the multi-national companies and they look to operate and exploit cheaper labour markets such as China and Thailand. The union movement in Europe is strong because workers believe their rights need to be protected by greedy corporations who rip them off. Higher wages usually results in higher living standards, high inflation and higher rates of unemployment. 

Once upon a time there was the rise of the Soviet Union and Japan. One doesn't exist anymore and one had it's bubble burst back in the early nineties from which it never properly recovered. China (and to a lesser extend India) are both rising powers but both still lag quite far behind the US in many ways. For one just take a look at the UN Human Development Index. They are way below many countries and have enormous internal issues of which the US has nothing like. Of course in recent times the US has been badly hurt by the financial crisis, it's military is badly stretched and true enough it has some internal issues of it's own but it will recover like it has before. Financially weaker perhaps but militarily it will remain dominant. For a while now we have had three major economic blocs. The European, The East Asian and The North American so the US is used to having other economically powerful nations and blocs. That's the future, not individual countries. China and the US both depend on each other. This is unprecedented in imperial history. So the likelihood of war between the two are slim.

Numonex-

Actually if you look at the countries with the highest standards of living (Scandinavian nations such as Norway) they have a low unemployment rate, high standards of education and public services such as healthcare, high worker wages and benefits and low inflation. All the major natural resource industries are state owned but it has a thriving private sector. The only downside is the high cost of living and high taxes but that's surely a decent trade off.

China's economic growth is mainly caused by export to the West. So if the West would be ''doomed'' so would China.

More importantly though when China becomes more wealthy, labor will become more expensive aswell, reducing export and economic growth with labor shifting back to the west. In the end things will simply stabilize.

They have their own problems, plus even if they're doing better than us, why would we be doomed? We aren't doing that bad even in this economical crisis we have here, and I doubt China has any plans of world conquest.