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| - A look at how the two superpowers compare in a range of sectors, from the economy and technology to the environment and the space race. The United States, with an area of 9.8 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles) and China, which covers 9.6 million square kilometres, are among the four largest countries in the world, after Russia and Canada. China has the world's biggest population, with nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants, while the US is the world's third most populous country with 328 million (World Bank, 2019). The US is the world's leading economy, with a GDP of $21.428 trillion in 2019, followed by China with $14.343 trillion (World Bank, 2019). China's economy grew by 6.1 percent in 2019, its lowest rate in nearly three decades, while US growth was 2.3 percent, according to the World Bank. Both economies have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Although their economic systems are different, the levels of inequality are comparable in both countries. According to the World Bank in 2016, the richest 10 percent enjoy around 30 percent of the income in both. The US leads the world in military expenditure, spending $732 billion in 2019, ahead of China, which spent $261 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The US has some 5,800 nuclear warheads, well ahead of China's 320. Beijing has a new intercontinental ballistic missile that is said to be capable of hitting any location in the US. Apart from a military base in Djibouti and its involvement in United Nations missions, China's army has little international presence, in contrast to the US. The big tech players Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have all come from the US. China has its own homegrown tech giants, notably search engine Baidu, e-commerce titan Alibaba, cellphones brand Xiaomi, and Tencent, one of the world's biggest online gaming companies and also owner of China's main messaging app, WeChat. The US considers the Chinese telecom giant Huawei a threat to national security and has slapped sanctions on the firm, encouraging other countries to isolate it also. In 2019 China became the top filer of international patents, displacing the US, which had come first since the creation of the ranking in 1978, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. China is the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, responsible for 26.8 percent of total global emissions, followed by the US with 13.1 percent. Beijing has set a goal for carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2030, and the US, under former president Barack Obama, committed to reducing its emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025 compared with 2005 levels. However, President Donald Trump announced in 2017 he would quit the historic Paris agreement signed two years earlier which set the original goal. China is pouring billions of dollars into its space programme. In 2003 it became the third nation after the US and Russia to send a human into space. And in 2020 Beijing achieved a series of key advances, including the launch of the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system, Beidou, completing a network designed to rival the American GPS, and the launch of its first probe to Mars. It plans to complete a large space station in 2022. The US meanwhile is preparing at the end of July to launch NASA's most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance, and Trump has ordered the space agency to speed up its return to the moon to 2024 rather than 2028. Both countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council and have veto power. China is progressively extending its influence in UN agencies, taking advantage of US disengagement under Trump. Beijing increasingly supplies peacekeepers to international missions and has become the second biggest financial contributor to the UN after the US. The US has quit UNESCO, while the number two there is China's Xing Qu and Beijing is the first mandatory net contributor. Washington has also announced it will leave the World Health Organization, effective in July 2021, having accused the UN agency of bias in favour of Beijing during the coronavirus pandemic. bur-ang-eab/jmy/bmm
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