They're going to kill us economically, as Khrushchev once promised.

You would appear to be alluding to Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" remark. This was widely reported in the American press at the time (1959) as though the Sovs had brigades of Stakhonovite shock troops, shovels at ready, poised to heap earth upon our helpless living forms. The truth, as you probably know, was tamer: Khrushchev in fact employed a Russian aphorism, considerably older than Marxism itself, the sense of which was "we will be there for your funeral," i.e., we will outlive you. It was rather a prediction of the outcome of the ideological pissing match in which his empire and ours were then engaged, and not a threat to entomb us before our time. As it turned out, of course, he got it bass-ackwards: the USSR was, to its vast surprise, the guest of honor rather than a satisfied onlooker when it came time to hold the obsequies, and a new era of American triumphalism was launched. (He said "Your grandchildren will live under communism." In fact, his son Sergei is now an American citizen. Then again, Eisenhower's granddaughter is married to one of the old USSR's senior rocket scientists. We may assume that both statesmen, forty years ago, would have found this state of affairs difficult to credit.)

Actually the Sovs were outproducing us late in their history in many of the indices (steel, concrete, traditional smokestack industries) K had in mind. Alas for Khrushchev and communism, the USA was already running in a different race by 1980.

As to China...they have lots of still-untapped potential there, and one of the few economies in the world presently firing on all cylinders. Of course, they also have a massive disenfranchised peasant population to whom the "New China" looks an awful lot like both the old ones. I suspect, though, that China will be a few decades addressing their internal issues before they undertake to eat our lunch.

cordially,