The question of why China did not industrialize is one that has vexed historians for a long time, and I'm not going to go over that debate. One thing that fascinates me is how powerful China could've been if they had industrialized first. Since they have 20% of the World's Population, assuming they raise their GDP per capita to 3 times the global average, they would control a whopping 42% of the world's output. With that kind of dominance, how much power would they project? Would they conquer all of Asia and perhaps extract lots of unequal treaties from Europe?