It may very well be China's way of taking over the US--not through military means, but our own game—capitalism.
But my personal oddball theory is that the thing that will protect the US (and by association, Europe) is English. It’s already the defacto "world language," learned by people around the world the way they would have learned French in the 19th century.
I have many friends in Brazil where they speak Portuguese, despite being surrounded by the Spanish-speaking South America. Their second language of choice is not Spanish, but English. I have a 17 year old graphic designer friend there and he speaks excellent English with no desire to speak Spanish.
Chinese, like Japanese, is just too old--and too complex to spread around the world. It takes too long to learn--and while learning it may actually help the mental acuity of those who do, it's not an efficient or direct language, it's not a language design for business, the way English is.
I went to Japan three times and learned first hand how hard Japanese is for business--because it was designed to be indirect, polite--it's specifically structured along cultural lines. Clearly the Japanese are doing well in busienss despite this, but their success, even at its height, never caused a flood of “foreigners” to learn Japanese.
Chinese is similar, and while people can clearly learn it (over 1 billion served!), it's not going to be a second language of choice for Western people because it's too alien, it's roots are not in Latin the way all Western languages are.
That doesn't mean that china won't become the US of the 21st century in terms of “Super Power,” they very well might--though it will take one or two more generations who are allowed free communication and contact so they can express their creativity in ways that are good for business.
But I don't think future generations of people in the West will be speaking Chinese, which means that the culture war will still be won by the west.
Yes, we all love kung fu movies, but how many have affected styles of dress, music, and pop-culture in general. Even after many years of westernization, Japan's Anime is one of the very few Japanese pop-culture phenomenons.
So my money's on English and Western pop-culture, and that tends to have a great deal of power over the imagination and perception of power. And it's perception of power, rather than real power, that counts in the end.
