When Does the Chinese Century Begin?

“Why do you want your son to get to know China?” James asks. We’re sitting in the sun, by a rushing canal in beautiful Lijiang Old Town.

“Well,” I say. “I’m British. The 1800s were our century. The 1900s were America’s century. And the 2000s will be China’s century.”

This isn’t, as my ma points out when we talk on Skype later, precisely accurate. A better system would date Britain as a world power from the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, after 1815, the US from the end of World War I, the last and most disastrous of a series of costly wars (sound familiar?), after 1918.

And China — well, I’m wondering quite when people will date the Chinese century from. 2020 has a nice kind of symmetry, though I don’t know how auspicious it is in Chinese astrological and number terms.

But Z, a child of the new millennium, thinks we’re already in it, here in 2011, his eleventh year.

“Everything’s made in China now,” he says. “Nothing’s made in America. They have more American money than America does. They’re buying up most of Africa and they have a monopoly on virtually everything.”

In the short time we’ve been here, there have been moments that feel significant. We watched the launch of the first module of China’s space station.

The guys at state TV set the montage to the tune of America the Beautiful. A sense of humour? Or just the knowledge that the hundreds of millions who tuned in would neither know nor care?

Still, as a friend observes on Facebook, there’s a poetry to it. China launching their first station as the American space programme goes down — and playing an American anthem…

An innocent mistake? It could have been. Since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s Chinese schoolchildren, who put in punishing hours of school and homework, have learnt not only the geography of Asia, Western Europe and Latin America but every state of the US and its capital. They don’t, however, learn American music.

Over green tea, we talk with James for a bit about debt, the downgrade, the fact that China holds more dollars than the US, now.

“But we’re poor people,” he says. “China is poor! This is what we can’t understand. Why are we poor people lending these rich people money?”

But, I think, this was how it went with America. There’s a Gilded Age in China now, when the rich are super-rich, and consume to bust, the poor are poor and work incredibly hard to get richer.

And, as America got rich lending and selling into Europe — proceeds made off the back of its hardworking poor — China is getting rich selling into the US and Europe. Funding, in effect, as America did for us, wars that our country could not afford.

Another turning point? Back from our trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, I check the Guardian to see what’s been up with the world in our absence.

A headline leaps out at me:

“US and China Call for Eurozone Action”

“The world’s two economic superpowers,” the article states — matter-of-factly.

How long, I wonder, before there’s only one? A decade? I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book that strikes me as on some levels strangely prescient and on others a wild misfire.

He praises Enron. The new modes of financing, the miracle that means you can slice up a bundle of mortgages and they become (deep breath now!) risk-free.

The things that the 99% are now Occupying Wall Street for. Will it change anything? Probably not.

When Z was a toddler, we marched with over a million others through London against the Iraq War. Our government went in anyway.

In China, you can see the growth. The new roads. New railways. New buildings. New stores. New cities. Everywhere you look. Even the supermarkets are bigger here.

You see the hot chicks in their designer labels, the politicians in their luxury watches — graft features here, as it did during the American Gilded Age — tiny jade abacuses, an executive toy, selling for tens of thousands of pounds.

You can also see the grinding poverty. A mentally ill woman gathering medicinal herbs, dressed in rags, in the mountain.

Is it a good thing, this handover of power?

You could argue that it’s bad. China executes slightly more people per head of population than the US does; it tortures slightly more; its people are much less free.

You could argue that it’s good. China’s interventions in the outside world to secure its interests are more mercantile than military — buying up water for hydro-electricity rather than bombing the Middle East for oil.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing, or a good thing. It’s, well, a thing.

Empires rise and fall. They always have, and until humans find a better way to get along, they always will.

And I’m curious to see how this great nation, a mother of invention with the longest continuous history in the world, adapts to its position centre stage.

That said, by the time Z’s children are old enough to explore, I don’t think it will be Westerners exploring China.

There will be millions upon millions upon tens of millions of Chinese exploring the West. We won’t, most of us, be able to afford to do the return journey.

The first person on the moon was American.

The first person onto Mars?

My money’s on Chinese.

But what do you think?