There has been extensive research on the possibility of the change of the hegemonic leadership between the U.S. and China. When we take a look back the history of the modern international relations, we can recognize that there have been specific leader countries who played leadership roles within each international structural stage. This means the previous experience of the leadership change between the U.K. and the U.S. should tell us some meaningful lessons to prospect the possibility of the leadership change between the U.S. and China. The research starts from this research question.

Simply speaking, it is impossible for China to play the role of the U.S. in the areas of ① trade, ② global finance, ③ military security, and ④ multilateralism. Firstly in trade, most of the nations in the current international society pursue to maximize there national interests with the current liberal international trade order. Most of the nations never understand China should play a role to initiate the future international trade order in terms of value, institutions, leadership, and followership even with the many structural problems of the current trade order. Secondly, China, in particular, has not prepared a global financial leadership in the perspective of ‘gold-standard system’ which is one of the most critical preconditions for the global financial leadership. It is also interesting to know that the total volume of the US dollar in the global financial market has been smaller than before, and the same time the portion of the Euro and the Yen got larger, not the Chinese currency.

Thirdly, militarily speaking, the military power of each country is the accumulated outcome of all the factors including economic power, operational capability, human resources, overseas military bases, hi-tech technology, etc. China is far behind the U.S. in the means of all of these factors. Especially, China is not able to use all the military resources only to face the U.S. due to the long border lines with two nuclear powers, Russia and India, and the vulnerability of the geographic conditions of the 14 neighboring countries. Lastly, the two countries may engage relatively a close competition to initiate each own-centric multilateralism. But the Chinese self-oriented principles and world view could be a critical barrier to expand the idea of China’s world order, multilateralism, mutual interests, etc.