They always assume it will be a repeat of the Japan experience in the 1980s. But the notion that Japan would have a larger economy, in aggregate GDP, than the USA was always ludicrous. Japan has less than half the amount of people. Japan also had an economic model for consumer products where they tried a product in Japan first and then sold it in the USA. This kind of worked as Japan had similar standards to the USA in things like electric voltage and television signals, etc. It was much harder for, say, European companies to sell in the USA because of this. In comparison the European consumer market was much more fragmented. Nowadays the same model does not apply as easily. You have multi-voltage transformers in products. There is a more or less uniform standard for telecommunications signals (5G, WiFi). Video signals also a lot more standard with HDMI. So basically you can manufacture a product you can sell worldwide a lot easier. This has been seen with the rise of China as the major export nation as it replaces Japan and South Korea in major consumer technologies.
China has enough population that it can be a major consumer market by itself. A Chinese does not need to export to other countries to have massive success. This is similar to the situation US companies enjoyed in the past. Chinese companies still have issues today with global market penetration however. To a degree this is similar to the issues Japan and South Korea had before. There is the language barrier for one, this is especially important in the services industry, and the other issue is the much smaller capital market available in China. This makes it harder to scale up a company quickly. But with the introduction of capital markets in China things are changing a lot. The language barrier might not be solvable that easily but it is a two-edged sword in that it means foreign companies also have harder access going into China.
In the long term I see China having a lot of success with consumer products and services which don't require a lot of costumer interaction.
For China to win in consumer facing services it would be a lot harder but with the increasing use of the online sales and services model I don't think this will be that of a big deal. But China will have to make their banking and money transfer models more internationalized. Even if they have to use a separate currency for this it needs to happen. The US simply abuses its position in the sector way too much for China to do otherwise.
