Past glory can't fix current woes in China or Japan

As soon as he was installed as president, Xi Jinping pledged to fight for a "great renaissance of the Chinese nation and the Chinese dream". Simultaneously, in Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised to make Japan a "proud nation" again by getting rid of the pacifist constitution imposed by the American post-war occupiers.

You might say there is nothing, in principle, wrong with the ambition to be a great or proud nation, but China and Japan both carry potentially explosive historical baggage.

There is a larger question of whether great is a zero-sum game, and whether it is laudable or even achievable in the world of 2013 and beyond. Unfortunately, politicians see greatness as a reflection of their ability to ride roughshod to get their own way.

These are dangerous waters in which to sail, at least for anyone from the tired old West. After all, two centuries ago, didn't Britain become "great" because its Royal Navy commanded the oceans, allowing its traders to plunder the globe, invading anyone who stood in its way, installing new governments, redrawing maps across Africa and Asia in ways that made no sense, and of course causing mayhem across China when officials feebly objected to their people being force-fed opium?

In the last century, didn't Washington enforce Pax Americana, with the backing of its powerful navy and the help from time to time of CIA covert ops to topple a tiresome tyrant?

So why should Americans or Britons whinge if China is now throwing its weight around a bit, making friends all over the world with its ample aid funds, building bridges, dams, factories and power plants? So far, Beijing has not toppled governments, though it is supporting a host of unsavoury rulers.

As a Yorkshire-born Irish Catholic, I shall sail on and assert that my old folks were usually the oppressed; that the historical record of colonialism is mixed, and that today no nation can ignore the repercussions of its actions on others.