M D Nalapat
Giving
a rival credit is always difficult, so it is no wonder that few
commentators in Europe, North America and India mention the fact that
the ongoing visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to the US is
pathbreaking. In the past too, Chinese Heads of State have landed up in
Washington. There was Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Jiang Zemin in the
1990s. Both Deng and Jiang worked hard to give a positive impression of
China and its people to the US public, wearing cowboy hats and boots,
and in Jiang’s case, singing a song in American English. During the
1980s,China was dependent on the US for almost all its technology and
its economic progress, a situation that had not dramatically changed
when Jiang Zemin came calling. However, from the time he took over power
in 2002, Hu Jintao has concentrated on making China a technology
superpower, nurturing R & D laboratories and presiding over the
growth of world-class companies such as Huawei.
For the first time in the history of relations between China and the US, it is a meeting of equals. An Indian scholar in the US estimates that in Purchasing Power Parity terms, the economy of China is already as big as that of the US. Others say that it will take China about fifteen years to reach parity. However, what is not in doubt is that China under Hu Jintao and his designated successor Xi Jinping is on course to become the world’s biggest economy within the first quarter of the 21st century. In five years time, the country will most likely be competing with Boeing and Airbus to sell Aeroplanes across the world, and in ten years, will probably produce manufactures that are qualitatively superior to those being made within the powerhouse of the European Union, Germany. Over the past decade, China has moved away from being a low-end supplier of intermediates into a producer of sophisticated finished products, thereby posing a threat to the present commercial hegemony of the US and the EU.
