Ask Lemmygrad

China already surpassed the US in terms of the real productive economy. The US includes financialized nonsense in its GDP, things that aren't productive at all but are rather weights on production and individuals. Examples:

• When someone has to pay an overdraft fee, that gets counted in GDP as a financial service. A situation that is actually a personal debt is counted as creating and selling a commodity.

• Increasing housing values / prices are included as well. A house sits there doing squat for a decade doubles in value and gets sold. Hundreds of thousands get added to the GDP even though the price difference is due to financial speculation and a physical monopoly (location). Also, housing costs outpace inflation, so this scenario is actually increasing the cost of living.

• Don't even get me started on health insurance.

China has surpassed the US because it has become vastly more productive in its real economy, in its ability to make real things and useful services. It has been able to do that by increasing capital intensive production and technology by dangling cheaper costs in front of the international bourgeoisie, which they gladly accept. A bit of an imperialism switcheroo and a risky yet successful gambit.

Is this good for socialism? Of course. International capital, seated in the white supremacist North Atlantic countries, depends on imperialism, ultimately through hybrid warfare (military and financial weapons). A strong China undermines imperialism in several ways:

• Directly in their own country by creating a geopolitical position in which they can set their own terms of governance, including economic. Compare China's situation to that of India since the 90s. India went in precisely the opposite direction and suffers tremendously by imperialism. Also China is literally run by a communist party

• By providing an alternative trading partner that undermines US sanctions, a real weapon of war.

• By providing alternative financial systems, e.g. what BRICS may deliver. Groups like the IMF are an arm of imperialism and they are increasingly undermined. Dollar debts are used to trap countries on imperialized suicide paths. Watch Argentina nosedive straight into that trap.

• By providing an alternative model that is entirely realizable, arguably more realizable, through socialist anticolonial revolution.

US/UK-led imperialism has been the primary barrier to socialism for over a century. It has murdered millions upon millions to keep the ruling class at its perceived advantage. This is usually why revolutions failed and nearly always why they were dismantled after early success. Hell, the imperialists don't even allow us to exist when we win elections, with examples in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (the global south, not coincidentally). They are an ontological evil, the greatest threat to socialism, and they must be destroyed at all costs.