China's drive for regional power status is, however, much stronger than Brazil's, and it has nuclear weapons. It is now ready to join the World Trade Organisation and hopes to achieve the status of developed world power by 2050. The doyen of Chinese statesmen in Asia, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, predicts that by mid-century China will be the world's second-largest, if not largest, trading nation. Australian politician Bob Hawke said that in absolute terms, China's economy is likely to exceed that of the US by 2025, thereby resuming a position it has occupied for most of the past two and a half thousand years.
There is a hard road ahead. Currently China's economy is much smaller than Japan's or South Korea's and its per capita income is less than $4,000, far below that of developed nations. China's reform programme of the past 22 years is still only half-completed and is plagued by state inefficiency, environmental degradation and rampant corruption.
Communist China has embraced capitalism but continues to support outdated state-owned enterprises to avoid adding to a big pool of laid-off workers. Of the 900 million people who live off the land, millions will be forced to look for jobs in the overcrowded cities if cheaper US and European farm produce floods China under WTO rules.
China should be seen today as two nations, one along the coastal cities which is prospering, getting wired up, and ready to make a great leap forward into a post-modern world with its focus on cyberspace, and another, mainly rural China where hundreds of millions live in poverty.
China's big eastern cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are in a fever of upgrading. Old buildings are being replaced by cavernous palaces clad in glass and marble and a new business class is thriving.
But beggars are also becoming a feature of Chinese city life as social divisions deepen. In the provinces the construction boom has disfigured many cities, where blackened concrete shells of half-constructed buildings remain as evidence of failed investments.
Many Western analysts worry about China becoming successful. If half of the Chinese population of 1.26 billion achieves the lifestyle of an average American and acquired a car, said one expert, the strain on the world's resources would be unbearable. But the argument may be spurious. Who can say what new fuels will be developed and what new means of transport will be introduced by the middle or end of the 21st century?
Much of the dynamism of China and its Asian neighbours comes from a unique resource - the 50 million overseas Chinese who live in countries scattered around Asia, with the exceptions of Korea and Japan. The economy of the overseas Chinese is reckoned to be the third-largest in the world after the US and Japan.
A review by Forbes magazine in the mid 1990s found that 517 of the top 1,000 companies listed on 10 Asian stock markets - Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta and Manila - had an ethnic Chinese as the single largest stockholder. The six million Chinese in Indonesia, forming only three per cent of the population, control an estimated 70 per cent of the economy.
Singapore, the biggest economic success story of south-east Asia, is a Chinese city. The one-third Chinese population in Malaysia controls most of the trade and investment. In Thailand and the Philippines, Chinese populations of as little as three per cent account for 60 and 70 per cent of the economies respectively. The richest Asian country is Chinese Taiwan.
The boom in communist China is partly due to overseas Chinese who account for four fifths of all investment in the country. No other country in the world, certainly not Brazil, has such a powerful Diaspora.
While some of this investment into China comes from Taiwan, it is limited by the Taiwanese fear of becoming dependent on communist China. The political differences between communist Beijing and democratic Taipei could be the biggest danger to the success of the Asian Century.
China has stated that it will not give up the use of force if political dialogue fails to achieve unity with its lost `province' to which the defeated Nationalist army retreated after the 1949 communist revolution. Beijing is building up its military power and by 2020 may be able to challenge Washington's strategic role in Asia which has ensured Taiwan's survival and helped maintain regional stability while advancing US interests.
The economic interdependence of Asian countries means that any China-US confrontation, or a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, would affect the whole region, and provoke at least a repeat of the Asian crisis of 1997-98 by scaring off global capital. Taiwan will not consider unity until communist China becomes democratic. Its ideology discredited, China's leadership has an informal arrangement whereby it allows the people to do what they like as long as they don't challenge their authoritarian rule by word or deed.
It is a fragile basis for governance and unlikely to last another 50, let alone 100 years.
China's transition to democracy may be the best hope for peace in Asia, where the trend during the second half of the 20th century has been towards democratisation. Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia are the latest to embrace democracy.
No two Asian countries have identical development and where democracy brought stability to Taiwan and Japan, it has the opposite effect in Indonesia. There the removal of a military-backed dictatorship has released separatist forces which could break up the archipelago and threaten some of the world's most important shipping lanes.
The prospect for democracy in Myanmar and North Korea remains remote at the turn of the century. The Cold War lives on in the Korean demilitarised zone.
"Asia is not as stable as Europe and North America. In fact it is one of the most unstable regions in the world," said former South Korean Deputy Prime Minister, Rha Woong-bae.
If China "doesn't matter", Japan certainly does. Its gross national product accounts for two thirds of the Asian economy. Its share of world output soared from 1.5 per cent after the war to 16 per cent by the late 1990s. It is the trade and investment locomotive for the rest of the region.
Despite the bursting of its economic bubble in 1990, it maintains the highest living standards not just in Asia but the world. It has not been able to match the dynamism of the US in riding the information revolution and its recovery is flagging. But if recent trends are anything to go by, Japan is fighting back successfully on another Asian front against US-dominated multiculturalism. The young generation in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan are going crazy for Japanese music and film and pop culture products.
Some western industrialists have no doubt however about the future.
"Asia-Pacific nations will come roaring back - and be among the leaders of this new century," Rick Wagoner, head of General Motors, told journalists in Tokyo in October.
Perhaps it is only fair to allow the last word to Mr Mahathir, whose grandiose vision for his country in the 21st century can be seen in a dazzling green-domed palace for future prime ministers, built beside an artificial lake outside Kuala Lumpur.
The Malaysian Prime Minister has been much criticised for the boorish treatment of his imprisoned pro-reform deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, and is seen in the West as a representative of the worst type of Asian values, such as cronyism and manipulation of the media. But in a millennium book called A New Deal for Asia, Mr Mahathir assures us that the 21st century cannot be an Asian century, but should be a co-operative endeavour of East and West to mutual benefit.
He also wants to see an end to global casino capitalism as the main cause of instability in Asia. Often Mr Mahathir is right for the wrong reasons. The film Entrapment is a case in point, on which many people would also agree with him.
It is just a pretty awful movie.