China surging ahead - A new age of Chinese dominance

History offered another one of its delicious ironies yesterday when a World Bank report suggested that China, hardly 30 years after Communist demigod Mao Zedong’s death, will become the world’s biggest economy and the country with the greatest purchasing power this year, several years earlier than had been anticipated.

It was after all Mayday, the day when socialist leaders — often tyrants, sometimes merely bewildered — once celebrated whichever brand of the ideology they advanced with grand military reviews and threatening nationalism dressed up as something else altogether. The great tattoos in Moscow’s Red Square or Peking, as it was then, were designed to intimidate neighbours — Ukrainians still understand this — and potential enemies as much as they were to impress socialist fellow travellers.

China understood the power of political and military pomp too and even if it quickly discounted the World Bank prediction, probably to avoid concessions on trade, climate change or currency parity, the change in China’s place in the world since it embraced, and adapted, capitalism is still one of the great shifts in history. Indeed, there is hardly a change of direction or objectives as dynamic or forceful in all of human history.