The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
— American writer Richard David Bach

MAYPAJO, Caloocan City — With the trade war between the United States and China escalating, global manufacturers are now being pushed to take a harder look at a viable alternative to China like India which
has emerged as a key player with several cmpanies like Apple shifting production to the sub-continent.
But setting this aside, let us first look into a point-by-point comparison of the world’s two biggest economic powers, which both are not only geographic and demographic giants, but military superpowers as well.
With a surface area of more than nine million square kilometers (3.5 million square miles) each, the United States and China rank among the world’s four biggest countries, after Russia and Canada.
China is the world’s second most populous country after India with 1.4 billion inhabitants, and it has four times more people than the United States. However, the United States is the world’s biggest economy, with a gross domestic product of more than US$29 trillion in 2024, followed by China with more than US$18 trillion.
According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), in 2024, China was the world’s biggest exporter of goods, totaling US$3.6 trillion and the United States the biggest importer at US$3.4 trillion. Actually, the US has a big trade deficit with China when it comes to goods, reaching US$355 billion in 2024.
The United States is home to the 'GAFAM' group of tech titans; namely Google, Apple, Facebook owner Meta, Amazon and Microsoft. On the other hand, China has its own tech giants known as 'BATX' and comprised of search engine Baidu, e-commerce platform Alibaba, video game and social media firm Tencent and smartphone maker Xiaomi.
And shifting to another technological development—the rise of artificial intelligence—a new front has opened in the Sino-American tech rivalry since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and with AI generative models mushrooming in both the US and China mainlands. The Chinese start-up DeepSeek, founded in 2023 by the High-Flyer investment fund, shook up the AI world in January with its R1 chatbot, able to match the functions of its Western competitors at a fraction of the cost.
Both sides have also clashed over TikTok. The hugely popular video-sharing app, which has more than 170 million American users, is under threat from a US law passed last year that orders TikTok to split from its Chinese owner ByteDance or get shut down in the US. The ban took effect in January but Trump has delayed it until June 19 to give time to find a buyer for TikTok. The ban is motivated by national security fears and belief in Washington that TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government
Finally, in military supremacy, the United States is the world’s biggest spender on defense. It earmarked US$916 billion in 2023, three times more than China, which ranked second with US$296 billion. The United States and Russia have nearly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, with more than 5,000 nuclear warheads each at the start of 2024, including those withdrawn and waiting to be dismantled. That is far before China which has 10 times fewer nuclear warheads.
With all of these data in view, which side will you be on when the ultimate 'clash of titans' finally happens in a cataclysmic physical war that hints on Ragnarok.

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