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The article reports on the global economic competition and changes. According to editor Fareed Zakaria, despite the fact that U.S. will remain as the sole superpower in politico-military level, developing countries such as China and India are starting to grow that will make the U.S.'s dominance to slowly fade. President Bill Stafford of the Great Seattle's Trade Development Alliance (TDA) says that the economic changes will create positive and negative impacts on American cities and its leaders.

The article compares China's expanding economy to other emerging economies in the world. China is only one of the world economy's emerging giants, along with India, Brazil and Russia. But it deserves special attention, because it has a bigger GDP than those three countries combined and, more importantly, it is much more integrated into the world economy, so its impact on other economies will inevitably be larger. India's population is almost as big as China's (the two together account for 38% of the world total), and its long-term economic potential is promising, but at present its economic weight in the world is still relatively modest. China's GDP is more than twice the size of India's, and its share of the growth in global GDP since 2000 has been three times larger. But the main difference is that China's exports of goods and services are about six times bigger than India's, and growing faster. Over the past 20 years, China's real GDP growth has averaged 9.5% a year, compared with India's 5.7%, and it is likely to outpace India's for at least another decade. Looking two decades ahead, India will probably overtake China in the growth stakes because its population is younger and growing faster, so its workforce will continue to expand when China's ageing population will start to slow it down.