Why China won't cut it

Richard Armitage once  told me that China will never be great until it stands for something more than itself. America has always stood for something more than itself. Roosevelt and Acheson crafted a synergy of American and global interests that produced the liberal world order we inhabit today – a world of widespread freedom, unprecedented global prosperity, and an absence of great-power conflict.  

- Jerry Nockles, Allure of Normalcy: America's First-Order Foreign Policy Issues in the Lowy Interpreter

Precisely. Which is why China will never be great. Such great-mindedness is found in millions of Chinese, but not in millions more, and not in China collectively. And I doubt it ever will be, unless perhaps there is a universal, profound, and prolonged ideological shift - the utter triumph of Falun Gong, for example.