A Partnership of Equals  How Washington Should Respond to
China's Economic Challenge  To be an economic superpower, a
country must be sufficiently large, dynamic, and globally
integrated to have a major impact on the world economy. Three
political entities currently qualify: the United States, the
European Union, and China. Inducing China to become a
responsible pillar of the global economic system (as the other
two are) will be one of the great challenges of coming decades
-- particularly since at the moment China seems uninterested in
playing such a role.  The United States remains the world's
largest national economy, the issuer of its key currency, and in
most years the leading source and recipient of foreign
investment. The EU now has an even larger economy and even
greater trade flows with the outside world, and the euro
increasingly competes with the dollar as a global currency.
China, the newest member of the club, is smaller than the other
two but is growing more quickly and is more deeply integrated