World View/Paul Gillespie: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," Mao Tse-tung told Chinese communists in 1938, as his movement struggled against the Kuomintang nationalists and yet supported them in a united front against Japanese imperial occupation.
Sixty-six years on his remark is quoted by two US commentators on the East Asian region in the International Herald Tribune (July 13th). Today's leaders in China "know it also grows from trade", write Jason Shaplen, a former policy adviser at the Korean Peninsula Energy Organisation, and James Laney, US ambassador to South Korea, 1993-97.
They use trade figures to bolster their argument that in this region China's influence is rapidly rising, that of the US rapidly declining. Within six years, China's economy will be double Germany's, now the world's third largest. By 2020 it is expected to surpass Japan as the world's second economy. Japan now imports more from China than from the US, the numbers having risen by over 50 per cent in the last five years - a major psychological shift which might be compared to Ireland's per capita income outgrowing the UK's in 1998.
China accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the increase in Japan's exports last year and has just become South Korea's largest trading partner. Patterns of global as well as East Asian power are affected by these changes. The European Union will become China's primary trading partner next year, displacing both the US and Japan. That too will have an important geopolitical effect in due course.
Shaplen and Laney conclude that while the Bush administration still thinks of the US as the sole superpower in a unipolar world, Tokyo and Seoul do not share this view any more. To them, the US and China "are both powers to be reckoned with in a bipolar Asia".
The six-party multilateral negotiations on North Korea's nuclear crisis is the best example of China's new power in the region. While Beijing could not have been such a critical player five years ago, today both Seoul and Tokyo have publicly adopted pro-engagement policies which Washington previously rejected.
Projected forwards, the US will have to adjust to a very different set of realities there compared to its military and geopolitical dominance of the last 60 years. In this reconfiguration of power the shape of future relations between Japan and China is central. They go back a very long way - more than 2,000 years in human and cultural terms. Japan's imperial occupation of China, Korea and south-east Asia last century was brought to an end only by its defeat in 1945. It has left deep scars and, many commentators assume, unresolved and probably insoluble difficulties.
Tension is exacerbated by a resurgence of nationalism in China, fanned by the failure of Japanese leaders to atone fully for their imperial past. This is exemplified by the Japanese prime minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine for 2.5 million war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals. That is why, the Economist argues, Japan is "standing in the way" of China's superpower ambitions. It should be a source of comfort to Washington and a continuing object of its foreign policy.
Interpreting Japan's policies and behaviour to the US and Europe has long pitted such conventional wisdom against alternative views of its achievements and potential. A long-standing member of the latter group has been Eamonn Fingleton, an Irish business analyst and writer based in Tokyo and the author of three books arguing that Japan's fundamental economic strengths have been gravely underestimated in the West.
In particular its manufacturing industry and structural trade and budgetary surpluses will confer major competitive and political advantages as it reduces its post-war dependence on the US and reorients towards China.
Writing in the May edition of Prospect magazine, he says Japan and China are not enemies but friends - increasingly so now that their trading relationship is becoming so much more equal. This originates in the 1970s, after the historic Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with Beijing. In 1978 Japan and China signed a little-noticed treaty of friendship. During the 1980s China rapidly became the top recipient of Japan's substantial aid budget - not to relieve poverty but to build up Chinese infrastructure, notably transport support for its export industries.
Japan has also favoured China in tourism (with Japanese visitors there increasing 3.5 times from 1987 to 1.5 million in 2000 and a great flow of students both ways since then); technology transfer (successively on steel, petrochemicals, semiconductors and plasma screens); and diplomacy (after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and for WTO membership more recently).
Thus there is a persistent pattern of building up China's potential. Converging cultural values, dirigiste economics, paternalist politics and hostility to rights-based universalism are shared by the two states, along with a mutual but unspoken interest in challenging the US-led West for global leadership (think France and Germany).
Fingleton suggests the ritualised confrontations over Yasukuni, the disputed Senkaku islands (called Diaoyu in Chinese) or agricultural trade are contrived - at least between state elites - and designed largely to mislead conventional Western opinion, especially in Washington.
Another contrarian, Niall Ferguson, the sympathetic British historian of empire and lately of the American one, writing in the June Prospect, underlines the euro's big chance to gain from this new configuration of power. East Asia's savings and reserves (predominantly Japanese and Chinese) account for 60 per cent of the world total and are held mostly in US dollars.
Were they to be switched even in part to the euro - by now well established as an alternative currency reserve - there would be worldwide political and economic consequences. While "world money does not mean world power", the loss of the dollar's sole status would undermine US military power, jolt its economic hegemony by forcing up interest rates, expose its irresponsible deficits - and provoke oil producers to switch to the euro too. Watch this (contrarian) space.