Which way for China's bid to join rich nations as demographic time bomb ticks?

Does China want to join the club of rich nations again after a 200-year interval during which it has been kicked around and bullied by Britain, France, the US and Japan - or will it settle for another few hundred years of being a middle-ranking middle-income country that can bully the smaller countries around the China seas?

That may sound tough but it is the tough choice facing President Xi Jinping and his colleagues once they have settled the Bo Xilai affair.

As an internationally respected economist with Chinese heritage put it to me: "China has a 15 to 20-year window of opportunity, which is the time between now and when the population peaks. Its leaders have to decide what is most important to them. For me, they should sacrifice everything for the 200-year-old dream of joining the rich world."

The leaders may say that they want both to be an economic megapower and a military superpower, though, professing to be a peace-loving people, they would probably deny that they want to exercise the kind of dominance that the US does today and which the Soviet Union aspired to.

But in spite of its glorious economic success in pulling itself up from poverty to become the world's second biggest economy in the mere 45 years since Deng Xiaoping opened the doors to the rest of the world, the economic tide is now beginning to turn against China.

Its population will peak in about 15 years' time and it has already started to turn grey. At the same time, China urgently needs to restructure its economy. This is a complicated process. It needs to rebalance away from the investment binge and towards consumption.