China is rising; but how far, and how fast? After the release of projections based on new World Bank data showing that China will soon overtake the United States as the world's largest national economy, a debate has quickly ensued, with some China-watchers dismissing the new figures as an "accounting exercise" and others calling the revised data a "wake-up call." But the hue and cry obscures a more fundamental question: whether the scale and speed of China's ascendance is truly unique, or whether it resembles the emergence of earlier powers. China, it turns out, scores moderately on the first metric, and very highly on the second.

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Daniel Kliman is a Senior Advisor with the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.