That China will be the new superpower, alongside the United States, cannot be seriously contested. Its population of over a billion, its recent increase in economic strength and export capability, its status as a nuclear weapon state and its occupation of a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations will ensure that its aspiration is realised.

Indeed, its emergence as a superpower  should have occurred  50 years ago. It was the foolishness of its Communist ideology, of the Great Leap Forward, and of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, that seriously delayed its transformation.

In Communism and Marxism-Leninism the Soviet possessed an alternative ideology that had appeal to millions of ordinary people. China has no comparable ideology.

This is not just hypothesis. We have known, for many years, that the Chinese are excellent and successful capitalists when they are allowed to be. It is no coincidence that Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, all Chinese states and territories, became as modern and prosperous , two generations ago, as China is now. It has been by adopting capitalism and market economics, although with “Chinese characteristics” that the so-called Peoples Republic has flourished since Deng Xaoping. Today, China is Communist in name only. In effect it has created a system of State Capitalism in order to enable the Communist Party to retain its power and privileges.

Although China, nominally a Communist state, is now the world's other superpower, the world is not about to see a new Cold War of a kind we faced with the Soviet Union from 1945-1989. There are several reasons why one can say that the two situations are not comparable.

Firstly, the Soviet Union was not just a national threat to the United States and to Europe. In  Communism  and Marxism-Leninism it possessed an alternative ideology that had appeal to millions of ordinary people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in Western Europe. China has no comparable ideology. Its enthusiasm for authoritarianism and dictatorship is of appeal  to other despots and potential dictators. There may be other states that will end up, or even choose through election, a populist dictator but China cannot aspire, as the Soviet Union did, to be the potential leader of a global empire.