China and the West - UC Podcast

I have so little knowledge and so little time to check things out. Just like anybody else I tend to take things for granted if media present it in some plausible fashion. The UC podcast about China and the West presents the facts thus:

China’s phenomenal economic growth is paralleled in scale and speed only by the rise of the United States between the Civil War and the First World War in 1914. Since 1978 the economy has grown ninefold, and is set to become the second largest within a decade. From inauspicious beginnings, China has become a $2 trillion economy because the Communist Party has channeled huge savings into investment, and encouraged millions of workers into its booming cities, the biggest migration in history.

So, in simple terms, is China going to take over the West as the major power (economic, political, cultural)? We tend to believe so. The podcast features Will Hutton as a speaker and he points out some huge weaknesses of China and its economy. In short, China has serious economic problems to tackle but hardly the means to do so. More fundamentally an efficacious social fabric, institutions, lack, to take this on. So, not only is China hardly capable of taking over, in spite of the presented figures, it needs proper address and it seems the West is urgently needing to get this straight.

Not only ignorant me, also policy makers seem to fall prey to the apparent rise of China and fail to see its problems and weaknesses.