What Makes a Legacy? The Middle East or Asia?

Rowan Callick looks at what China watchers have been saying for years: Red Storm Rising! There is a need to hold discussions about the warning signs when the National Intelligence Estimate recently said the U.S. will lose its Global Power in 15 years; and China continues to grow economically...becoming the new economic power? The answer is yes. But then where will the U.S. be at that point?//JW sends.

China's stunning success at the Athens Olympics, its consumption of a quarter of the world's copper, aluminium, zinc and steel, its graduation of 325,000 software engineers a year - three times India's total - point to how far China has advanced down the track in this great project.

For the first half of the 20th century, China was crippled by fratricide and invasions. For most of the second half, it was a communist curiosity. The turn of the latest millennium, though, has seen the rebirth of the People's Republic as the centre of the new Asia, chiefly through exercising "soft power", boxing its full economic weight in a way that Japan has never achieved.

But China still needs to guard against prematurely over-reaching itself and sparking a regional reaction.
The continuing post-Cold War US presence in Asia remains widely accepted, including by China itself, as a steadying influence.

However, since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Washington has become inevitably distracted by the war on terrorism, which has its epicentre in the Middle East.

This savage yet unpredictable war has of course visited terrible damage in Bali, in the Philippines, in southern Thailand and elsewhere in South-east Asia, but has only lightly touched north Asia. Australia, rather than the US, has taken on the leading role in the Western alliance's involvement in combating terrorism in South-east Asia.

In solidarity with Washington, China has enlisted for the war - for Beijing has long been anxious about the capacity of its Muslim extremists to wreak havoc.

At the same time it has seized with both hands the opportunity to ease its way into an ever bigger role in the region.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has described China as "a friendly elephant" - one which backs the status quo instead of destabilising it as it mostly did under Mao. He says the country should "bring about lasting peace and stability in Asia through the establishment of a new international political and economic order that is fair and rational".