One interesting observation I've found browsing through the IMF's April 2024 World Economic Outlook statistics is this:
In terms of nominal GDP at current prices, the US-China gap is actually widening the US' lead and China's GDP has essentially plateaued since 2021 up to the IMF's estimated 2024 GDP. One click away onto the PPP GDP at current prices figures show that the China-US gap is actually widening
China's lead.
It used to be said that China will surpass the US in the much vaunted nominal GDP statistic, allowing China to boast the title of "world's largest economy." Now that seems to be further away, yet in the, apparently parallel, universe of PPP, it is China that is actually pulling away from the US. To see that, past the financialization and into the more material economic calculus of PPP data, China is consolidating its position as the largest economy should be a rather satisfactory "consolation prize."
The truth is that none of this ever really mattered from a practical basis. You could actually see, a few years back, a barrage of journal articles and news pieces arguing that GDP was an outdated metric. This was obvious psychological preparation to prime the Western audience into dismissing the eventual demotion of the US in nominal GDP terms. It was also obvious that the day before this demotion, the mass media was going to endorse a new "democracy" and "human rights" inclusive metric just like they already did with HDI once it became clear that China was skyrocketing up the HDI rankings. The long anticipated headlines would have then ended up as "China surpasses US using outdated economic metric," "Chinese state media propaganda celebrates number one status in economic metric that excludes democratic freedom," "China is now number one, so what?" Western chauvinism would have never allowed China to claim the currently existing prestige of the title they use to fawn over the US in the first place.
So I think at times, it is important to keep in mind the wider picture of things. The reason why it didn't matter because by historical GDP estimates, China had already once been the number one economy: during the Qing dynasty.
Then the Opium Wars smashed open China's front door and then all of those stats evaporated in the Century of Humiliation. British gunboats didn't turn around because Lin Zexu shouted, "Stop, you're attacking the world's largest economy!" That fact itself was what incentivized them to bombard Qing China into submission. The Taiping rebels didn't drop their pitchforks and go home because Qing officials berated them "for rebelling when Qing China was the world's largest economy" either.
Economic growth only matters if it is funnelled into the proper sectors like industry, manufacturing and research and when the entirety of society receives the dividends. It additionally only matters when the state is able to defend itself, otherwise you're just a tempting looking treasure chest waiting for the lock to get smashed open. That is to state the obvious but this fundamental deficit was why Qing China was the world's largest economy and then was subsequently beaten into the ground by imperialism and then overthrown and torn apart by its own disaffected people. This is why aiming for the same title again doesn't ultimately matter: Taiwan isn't going to be handed back just because you're now "top nominal GDP," the US military bases dotting the First Island Chain aren't going to pack up their bags because of it either. Nor are the Chinese people ever going to be treated with true respect or as genuine equals by the West or even the chauvinistic political class in South Korea and Japan because of that.
What matters isn't whether China outperforms its own past economic record but whether it outperforms everyone else in the relevant aspects. What matters is that sectors like manufacturing maintain its share of the economy and that the average quality of life and the material conditions of the Chinese economy is maintained and expanded, as PPP GDP figures attest. Beyond all that, what matters most is that the sight of the forest is never lost for the trees: any situation is salvageable so long as China maintains its sovereignty and defends the dignity of the Chinese people as the USSR under the CPSU's last leadership ultimately failed to do.
While trite and seeming tangential, it's important to emphasize the obvious because that obvious thing was precisely what China once lacked when it had nearly everything else. Above all, the preservation of true sovereignty is what is most important, as the lessons of China's past fall from the literal top and the tortured experience of the post-USSR region show. Given a choice of Qing China with the statistical feat of the "world's largest economy" and China in the 1950s, deeply economically impoverished and recovering from a century of hardship and war, yet finally sovereign once again, and the latter would be far preferable every time. So far, all these conditions are being accomplished and so, as long as these things are remembered and maintained in China, it is not at all undue to maintain some high optimism.
