The China challenge: by the time today's freshmen graduate from high school, China may have overtaken the U.S. as the world's largest economy. What does that mean for you and your future?

• Author: Levin, Dan
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

When Su Huairou was 12, he decided that he wanted to go to college in the United States. The Chinese teenager has spent the last six years making that dream a reality.

Su left home in Guiyang, a small city in southern China, to attend a special boarding school in booming Guangdong Province. Classes began before 8 a.m., and he did homework until lights-out at 11 p.m.

"I studied all the time, because my English had to be better than my classmates'," says Su, who is now 18 and just graduated from high school. Su's parents hired a college application consultant to coach him in English and improve his extracurricular resume. He took the SAT four times.

It seems to have paid off. This month, Su will begin his freshman year at the University of California, Los Angeles.

There are 100 million Chinese between the ages of 15 and 19--about four times as many as in the U.S.--and they're the first to come of age as China assumes its new role as a global power. China's economy is growing so fast that the International Monetary Fund estimates China could overtake the United States as the world's No. 1 economy as soon as 2016.

Su and his generation symbolize the challenges that China presents to the U.S. Today, much of what Americans buy is made in Chinese factories--from iPhones and jeans to furniture and refrigerators (see Voices, p. 28). China is using its growing wealth to buy American real estate and Treasury bonds.

At the same time, China is wielding the diplomatic influence that comes with its wealth, sometimes in opposition to American foreign policy goals. China's military--including a standing army of 2.3 million, the largest in the world--looms large in East Asia and other places where the U.S. has vital interests.

In short, experts say, the U.S. must contend with another superpower.

"The world is now facing a great power rivalry," says Daniel Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. "But at the same time we're very economically intertwined with China. The U.S. has never faced something like this in our history."

Free-Market Reforms

China has come a long way since 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communist forces won a civil war and founded the People's Republic of China. Over the next three decades, the country endured great turmoil and suffering as Mao lurched from one disastrous initiative to another.

By the time Mao died in 1976, China's economy was in ruins. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, introduced free-market reforms in...