Like a bull in a...

After enjoying a good decade, Red China is throwing its weight around on the world stage like a Sumo wrestler at an all-you-can-eat buffet five minutes before it closes. This isn't surprising–especially after Mr Barack Hussein Obama's kowtow to the Chinese Premier told the Celestials that the world's only hyperpower was going to sit out the next three years. No wonder Beijing is talking about opening bases in Pakistan with a breezy air that has India checking the firing circuits on their nuclear missiles and Japan checking the brochures for centrifuges.

It's the sort of thing that up and coming tyrants like to indulge in, but what does raise the eyebrows is how the rest of the world is taking all this sabre rattling and bluster at face value. True, China isn't the basket case it once was and its dictators have great ambitions, but neither of those justify dusting off the Ruler of the World seat for Hu Jintao's backside. Maybe it's because I'm getting old or because I teach history, but I've been through this scenario too many times before. Ever since Marco Polo, the West has had a latent inferiority complex when it comes to China. Sometimes this was justified, as in the heyday of the Chinese Empire when Europe had the GDP of a turnip and was having trouble with the Huns, the Vikings, the Vandals, the Visigoths, and just about every other invader with a secondhand battle axe while the only reason China didn't dominate the rest of the world was because they couldn't be bothered. That, however, was a very long time ago and since then the West and China have played a weird game of Westerners trying to suck up to these potential world dominators and the Chinese wondering why they were putting up with these uncouth, giant barbarians who smelled like rancid butter. Even when after an Anglo-French force was burning the Summer Palace and the Emperor was hightailing it for Mongolia, the West was shocked at how weak the Middle Kingdom was and still banged on in the popular press about how China's teeming millions were the ones to watch out for. It's the only reason why China has a seat on the Security Council despite the fact that when the chairs were divied out Canada was more of a force to be reckoned with than post-war Peking.

Even the coming of Mao's murderous hordes did little to change this attitude–in fact, they deliberately cultivated it as they murdered away behind the Bamboo Curtain that sealed off China from curious eyes. Without facts to go on, the West built a fantasy China like something out of a science fiction version of Kubla Khan. I well remember in the 1960s how pundits would breezily go on about how their were three superpowers in the world with China being one of them. At times, they even said there were only two and the USSR wasn't one of them. It came as an out and out shock in the 1970s when China opened up to the world and said world discovered that this "superpower" regarded the oxcart as the latest word in transportation, had and army where shouting really loud was the local version of the combat radio, and an economy that could be bought and sold by a tiny British colony on the Communists' south coast.

What we're seeing today is similar to that. True, China has been an economic miracle, but so was Japan, the Asian Tigers, Dubai, and a load of other instant giants that suddenly reverted to dwarf status. China is much wealthier than she was and she may well be become the second largest economy, but it's what's known as a candy-shell economy. Visitors to places like Shanghai are, of course, astonished by the building boom and how living standards have skyrocketed, but getting away from the coast you soon discover that most of China is still dirt-poor, ruled by corrupt apparatchiks, lacking in the welfare entitlements enjoyed even in the capitalist United States, and seething with resentments against their masters. True, the economy is white-hot, but it's a heat kept up by a Communist Party's frantically stoking the boiler by keeping the currency artificially low, ploughing money back into the system without any thought of whether or not it makes a return, and buying the loyalty of potential coup leaders. Worse, the Party's One Child policy has left China with not only 27 million young men who will never get a date, but a population that will, in the words of Mark Steyn, become old before it is rich. It also doesn't help when the Party launches expensive prestige projects like maglev railways and Moon programmes that the other great powers discovered back in the '60s cost as much as a small war without any hope of seeing any of their money again. Then there's China buying over a trillion dollars in US bonds that are supposed to give her the whip hand over the hyperpower. Maybe, but holding someone's IOU only gives you power over them if your name is Big Wilf. Otherwise, it can be just as much a liability as a strength, as a large number of Jewish bankers discovered when Edward II told them they could go whistle for their money. Far from being a foundation for world conquest, it's more of a recipe for a Japanese-style implosion when it comes time to pay the bills.

With the United States recovering from a meal of steamed Obama that's gone past its sell-by date and Europe still discovering that rebuilding the Napoleonic Empire via bureaucracy is a bad idea, China will continue to have a good time's dictator rock and roll show until 2013, but after Barry leaves office, things could get ugly. And then there's that other giant country of teeming millions that recently threw over a Marxist command economy for a capitalist model–and this one is an Anglophone democracy. Remember them? You talk to them every time you ring tech support and "Bob" in New Delhi picks up the phone.

Odds in ten years it won't be the dragon of China we're worried about, but the elephant of India.

But then, India has it's problems, too.