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MORE than half of Americans think China is already the world’s leading economy — an astonishing misperception, given that China’s gross domestic product is still less than half of America’s. As George Orwell once observed, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” China has grown at a breakneck pace for so long that its aura of invincibility has grown to outsize proportions in the Western imagination.

Now, however, there are signs that China’s growth is slowing to a rate that is ideal for the interests of the United States: fast enough to remain an important pillar of global economic growth, but not fast enough for China to remain a disruptive threat to American power.