Beijing doesn't do failure, and that is what makes the nation's future scarier every time it dodges a bullet. It looks like it's tempting fate. Confidence breeds hubris; it's pride that takes men to awesome heights before the gods send them crashing down to earth.
It is now a clich?that China has had a good crisis, and that it is emerging from the global financial crisis not only relatively unscathed, but has also managed to reap geopolitical dividends that will enable it to throw its already considerable weight even more effectively across Asia and around the world. It has secured assurances of a greater say in international institutions like the International Monetary Fund; the Group of Eight leading economies has become the G20, but some say it's really the G2 - China and the US - that really counts. Barely a global issue can be negotiated, let alone resolved, without China's participation.
China's success has installed pride in a new generation of Chinese, not only on the mainland but also overseas. When I was a high-school student in North America in the 1980s, many Chinese didn't want to speak the language and would sooner forget their culture. Now, everyone wants to learn Putonghua. Commodities investment guru Jim Rogers says he is making sure his young children grow up speaking Chinese.
In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, arguably the most widely read foreign affairs commentator in the US today, calls the central government 'relatively enlightened'. Recently, in the same publication, Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist - a proponent of the efficient-market hypothesis widely blamed for contributing to the current crisis - thinks it's a matter of time before China's economy will overtake that of the US.
'The day will come when China's total real GDP will exceed America's. Boohoo. But that's a realistic expectation,' Samuelson wrote. 'We begin now a new era in which China will increasingly make obsolete America's 1950-2009 world leadership. Your children and my grandchildren will live in this new and challenging era.'
I have heard all this talk before. So have you, if you are my age or older. Substitute China with Japan, and the current timeframe with the mid-1980s, and its dejavu all over again. Back then, some of my North American classmates started taking Japanese classes; better to speak the language of your future bosses, they said.
