 comprehensive national power (cnp) (; pinyin: zÅnghÃ© guÃ³lÃ¬) is a putative measure, important in the contemporary political thought of the people's republic of china, of the general power of a nation-state. cnp can be calculated numerically by combining various quantitative indices to create a single number held to measure the power of a nation-state.  these indices take into account both military factors (known as hard power) and economic and cultural factors (known as soft power). cnp is notable for being an original chinese political concept with no roots in either contemporary western political theory, marxism-leninism, or pre-20th-century chinese thinking. there is a general consensus that the united states is the nation with the highest cnp and that mainland china's cnp ranks not only far behind the united states but also behind japan, russia, france and germany. although some western assessments of china suggest that china will be able to match or overtake the united states in the 21st century, the most recent chinese projections of cnp suggest that this outcome is unlikely. according to reports on international politics and security published in 2003, 2006, and 2009 in the yellow book of international politics by the social sciences center, a government-sponsored chinese think-tank, the list of top 10 countries with the highest cnp score were as follows: {| class="wikitable" |- ! rank ! 2003 ! 2006 ! 2006 score ! 2009 ! 2009 score |- | 1 |  |  | 90.62 |  | 604.732 |- | 2 |  |  | 65.04 |  | 467.152 |- | 3 |  |  | 63.03 |  | 395.272 |- | 4 |  |  | 62.00 |  | 377.155 |- | 5 |  |  | 61.93 |  | 369.031 |- | 6 |  |  | 59.10 |  | 366.228 |- | 7 |  |  | 57.84 |  | 359.670 |- | 8 |  | {{flag
Chinese_words_and_phrases Foreign_relations_of_China International_relations_theory International_security