I think China will be able to get to 50% of the US per capita GDP in 20 years. If we assume the real US gdp per capita grows by 2% per year until 2030, that will bring it from 46,000$ currently to 68,000$.
At half that level China would be at 34,000$. Since China is at 4,000$ right now that would allow them to grow by 8 times in 20 years. Which would be 11% a year in real terms.
8% should be fairly easy for the Chinese to maintain as an average for the next 20 years.
Another couple things I want to mention relate to China's sheer scale. There is scale advantages in economies, and the world has never seen a nation of this scale in capitalism. Let me give the example a bank. Every bank needs a legal department, HR, PR, and so on.. and especially software is crucial.
Well whether your bank has 50 branches, 500 or 5,000 it needs basically the same software system. The Chinese will be able to apply serious scale in every investment.. like writing a banking software system.
Another aspect of scale is risk ability. A bank with 50 branches cannot be doing 1 billion dollar investments. Probably more like 100 million dollar investments. But a bank with 5,000 branches can do 10 billion dollar investments at the same risk level. (because it is funding quite a number of them).
We've already seen that in places like the Congo, where China is spending 11 billion dollars on a copper mining projects. The project involves building roads, rail, hospitals, electric grid, the mines and a port. No one else in the world can risk 11 billion dollars on a project that very well might go bad. China can because its one of maybe 50 or 100 similiar projects.. and they know a number will go bad. But for the 90% that work out, the returns are huge, and unavailable to smaller entities.
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