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"Although the United States has long consumed the lion's share of the world's resources," says Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based research institute, "this situation is changing fast as the Chinese economy surges ahead, overtaking the United States in the consumption of one resource after another."

Among the basic food, energy, and industrial commodities-grain and meat, oil and coal, and steel-consumption in China has already eclipsed that of the United States in all but oil. China has opened a wide lead with grain: 382 million tons to 278 million tons for the United States in 2004. Although eating hamburgers partly defines the U.S. lifestyle, China's 2004 intake of 64 million tons of meat has climbed far above the U.S. consumption of 38 million tons.

With steel, a key indicator of industrial development, use in China has soared and is now more than twice that of the United States: 258 million tons to 104 million tons in 2003.

With oil, the United States is still solidly in the lead with consumption triple that of China's-20.4 million barrels per day to 6.5 million barrels in 2004. But while oil use in the United States expanded by only 15 percent from 1994 to 2004, use in China more than doubled.

Nowhere is the explosive growth in China's consumer economy more visible than in the electronics sector. In 1996 China had 7 million cell phones and the United States had 44 million. By 2003 China had rocketed to 269 million versus 159 million in the United States. Although China has only 36 million personal computers versus 190 million in the United States, the number in use is doubling every 26 months. With household appliances, such as television sets and refrigerators, China has long since moved ahead of the United States. By 2000, for example, TV sets in China outnumbered those in the United States by 374 million to 243 million.

"China's eclipse of the United States as a consumer nation," says Brown, "should be seen as another milestone along the path of its evolution as a world economic leader. China is no longer just a developing country. It is an emerging economic superpower, one that is writing economic history. If the last century was the American century, this one looks to be the Chinese century."