China Rising
Eight hundred years ago China tried to consolidate its influence on Japan. It demanded that the neighboring nation pay a tribute and acknowledge imperial authority. In those times, that was the way of manifesting political and economic hegemony. But a typhoon – kamikaze, the divine wind –dispersed its fleet.
Three hundred years later, it was the turn of Japan, just reunited, to attempt conquering China. This attempt also failed for a similar reason: failure to control the sea. The two great powers of East Asia have always had deep but competitive relations: China was the source of culture, philosophy, religion (ideograms, the arts, Buddhism, Confucianism). However Japan never really imported or copied them; it always adapted them to its mentality and needs.
We can think of the "rewritten" ideograms, which became a new script of its own, while in other tributary nations of China they were left unvaried and used by cultivated elites in parallel to the vernacular. Since the end of the 1800s, the roles have been inverted: Japan fused Western techniques with the Japanese spirit, becoming the second economic power of the world. This rapid growth has almost cancelled the former sense of cultural dependence.
Over the last years, China has been impetuously regaining the position of hegemonic power it occupied for centuries, historically in Asia and foreseeably in the world. Many are the symptoms of growing Chinese regional and global influence: the study and reappraisal of Confucius, of Mao, the system of socialist values with Chinese characteristics all underline the growing confidence in its cultural identity which accompanies the progressive distancing from either political (Marxism-Leninism) or economic (capitalism or the free market) ideologies imported from the West.
The Western democratic model (a bit tarnished by the current crisis) is challenged by the Oriental developmental model of Confucian origin, where the boundaries between market and government, public and private are grey and uncertain: power must promote the welfare of subjects, and these in turn must give obedience to authorities.
The concrete expression of such sentiments is the opening of hundreds of Confucius Institutes all over the world with the aim of spreading the knowledge of the Chinese language and promoting cultural, educational, and economic cooperation between China and overseas communities; the institutes are generously funded by Chinese authorities.
At the opposite extreme there is the strengthening of the military navy and the creation of the "necklace of pearls", installations of various kinds from China to the Suez Canal, which have the objective of securing the supply of oil and raw materials, without which China would see its growth strangled: as of 2009, half of China's oil was imported.
Countries and even continents that until recently had been considered hunting grounds reserved for Western powers, such as Africa, or even Latin America, now see a rapidly growing Chinese presence: the medium-low technological level of Chinese products seem to better fit the needs of African consumers; Chinese investments are not constrained by conditions on workers' rights or the environment (unlike international organizations and Western nations investing there).
Other aspects of the emerging Chinese leadership are better known and certainly more important: the extent of its foreign currency reserves, the size of its domestic market and its export capabilities. In the near future, a Chinese could well sit in the IMF's control room. Naturally, today the world has become multipolar, and there are several strategic players. Right now a system with China at the center and a periphery of tributary states is unthinkable, but a few decades down the road...