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London, Aug 16 (ANI): China has overtaken Japan in the second quarter, after three decades of spectacular growth, to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States.

The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower, The New York Times reports.

The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo revealed that Japan’s economy was valued at about 1.28 trillion dollars in the second quarter, slightly below China’s 1.33 trillion dollars. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter.

According to experts, an unseating Japan, and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain, underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about 14 trillion dollars in 2009.

“This has enormous significance, it reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan,” Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said.

Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States, the paper states.

China has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources.

“This is just the beginning. China is still a developing country. So it has a lot of room to grow. It has the biggest impact on commodity prices in Russia, India, Australia and Latin America,” Wang Tao, an economist at UBS in Beijing, said.

China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions under the direction of the Communist Party, by virtue of its growing dominance of trade.

China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals. (ANI)