Eye on China: The dragon's lashing its tail

Travelling through southern Germany on holiday, I had a feeling of deja vu. The previous extremely wealthy country I had travelled through with the same atmosphere was Japan.

What atmosphere? Well, it's difficult to describe, but a comparison helps. It's different from the ruthless dynamism you get in New York, Shanghai or London.

In contrast, Germany and Japan have something absurd about them, although it manifests itself in different ways.

The German countryside and the cities are beautiful and the accommodation is spacious. People are slow, methodical and polite.

Encounters are always prefaced by greetings and farewells, emphasising your entitlement to a measure of respect simply by virtue of being a human being. Quite unlike China, where respect is a tribute paid solely to power and wealth.

The absurdity in Germany is its reluctance to accept that such a lifestyle, built on inflexible labour laws and hugely generous social security benefits, is a luxury it can no longer afford in a globalised economy.

In Japan, the absurdity is slightly less pleasant. The quality of life in Japan, with its ugly, cramped accommodation, its long commutes, its natural greenery paved over with pork barrel infrastructure projects, is far lower.

But people have the money to obsess about useless fancies: girls with cuteness in all its forms; men with pornography and comics.

For both sexes, acquiring an identity through consumption is a process that seems to have gone further than in any other country.

These two countries are the second- and third-most powerful in the world, but you would never guess it. Politically, militarily and culturally, both countries punch way below their weight.

The main reason for this passivity is their defeat by the Allies in World War II. When I say defeat, I mean they were literally bombed back to the stone ages. After the war, barely a building was left standing in either country and most men of military age were killed, wounded or captured.

One could say both countries have learned a key lesson about the advisability of challenging the United States.

Although that consciousness has brought enormous benefits to the world, a sense of ambition or idealism seems to have been lost in Germany and Japan. Germany has built itself a paradise, where as long as you work hard and toe the line, you can go cycling, skiing and sailing at the weekends.

Japan has achieved something similar, at least compared with any other country in Asia.

What you are not meant to do in either country is wonder about your place in the world or articulate an alternative ideology to the Anglo-Saxon consensus.

In return, both countries have sheltered under the US military umbrella and received preferential access to the vast US markets.

The contrast to China is rather frightening. Its US$1.6 trillion ($2.25 trillion) economy is still small compared with the US$12 trillion economy of the US. But note this: it's the only country in the world with the economic potential to usurp the US that has not been roundly defeated by the US and its Western allies.

Even when their country was being carved up like a melon by the 19th century imperialist powers, the Chinese never lost the conviction that their civilisation was superior.

Research on the 1900 Boxer rebellion shows how completely unimpressed the Chinese were by battleships, powerful rifles and steam engines.

They simply retreated more deeply into a mystical, magical idea of China. Chinese superiority was simply not negotiable.

There is a great example in Chinese history of the country's response to foreign dominance.

During the Han dynasty in the second century BC, China was threatened by the Huns, who exacted huge tributes of women and booty. Unready for a long and bloody war, the Chinese had to grin and bear it.

Three Han emperors came and went, slowly and methodically building up their economy and their armies.

Finally, Emperor Han Wudi went to war against the Huns and smashed them, hunting down and killing men, women and children.

Even the Hun peace envoys were killed.

The Huns, who wiped out every single other army they met on their subsequent forced migration westwards, had received their comeuppance for all the fawning and scraping they had exacted from the Chinese for so long.

With China's economic growth so strong during the past 20 years, that desire to recapture past supremacy is getting stronger by the day.

China's economic rise can be seen as the fiscal part of a pincer attack against US power, the other part being a political threat from Islam.

It is to be hoped that the US response to China will be more successful than its response to Islam in Iraq has been.

* The writer remains anonymous to protect his position in China.