Li Peng, China's second most powerful leader, came visiting India in early January, and clearly his interest was more than a pose with Mrs. Li in front of the Taj. A lot had happened to the world and Asia since his earlier trip of 1991, fast on the heels of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In South Asia, India (and Pakistan) had gone openly nuclear and New Delhi is now in full embrace with the United States.
For India and the rest of South Asia, it is the direction taken by Beijing that is a matter of immense strategic and economic concern. Although no longer viewed as an enigma, China is a subject of abounding interest, concern and speculation. Changes in that one country will affect everyone. Deprivation of freedom of expression and association is unsustainable in a globalised economy within the information age, and the cataclysmic upheavals which will overtake China when (not if) the tight lid of political control comes off will have consequences for global security.
In the big league, China stands alone as a country that does not accept a pluralistic and democratic value system. Its socialism, modified to market-socialism by the cynical dictums of Deng Xiaoping, has little to do with egalitarian order and is instead a thin cover for one-party dictatorship. But political backwardness has not blunted China's economic clout, and it is perhaps the only country outside the Western hemisphere in a position to launch a trade war against the United States.
It is the recognition of this economic prowess, rather than Beijing's willingness to conform to international rules, that has gained it membership into the World Trade Organisation. Unlike the case with India, China's imminent entry into the WTO will not hamstring it with multilateral arrangements. It has sewn up bilateral agreements that give it tremendous, and even unfair advantages, in the international trading system.