If the moderator will allow me, I will respond to Ellis Krauss' suggestion by sending an as yet unpublished piece precisely on the analogy of Japan
1920-45 and a feeling-its-oats China today. It was written in response to a rather fatuous "let's all be buddies" op ed by Funabashi, former editor of the Asahi, but the FT editor found my response a bit too provocative to print. Here it is

The best scenarios start from historical analogies.
There are two obvious candidates for predicting the course of US-China relations over the next forty years:
the US-Russia cold war 1950-1990, and Japan's relations with Europe and America from 1902, when the Anglo-Japanese Alliance made it an acknowledged Great Power, to 1945.

The Cold War is relevant because at its heart was an arms race. At present, given recent maritime scuffles, analyses of US-China strategy are preoccupied with aircraft carriers and submrines, and what last year's annual Congressional report on China's actitivities directly affecting American interests calls the "particular concern that China's military modernization is designed to limit our freedom of action in the region." But for reasons I will explain, it should not be long before China is a very serious competitor in the missile performance and defence competition that was the key to hegemony in the first Cold War. "First strike capacity" will be the name of the game. And as soon as Congress wakes up to it, that will be at the heart of the competition.
As for the Japan analogy, it should be taken to heart by all those Western politicians who solemnly hope that China will become a "responsible stakeholder" in the world system. (A bit like the owners of Walmart hoping that their employees will act as responsible stakeholders in their firm.) The parallels are legion.
Japan was acknowledged to be a Great Power in 1902, but not as Great as others. It was frustrated at the Versailles peace conference (it wanted racial equality to be written into the preamble) and the Washington and London treaties forced it to accept naval inequality - only three battleships for every five the US and UK had. As in China today, its clever leaders emerged from a bureaucratic peer-review promotion process, and as in China today rivalry between the separate civil and military bureaucracies and their competing proposals for raising the nation's "standing" had an enormous influence on external policy. As in China today, the first branch of civilian government to fall under the sway of the military was the Foreign Office. And as with China today, outsiders comforted themselves with speculation about internal revolution and collapse that somehow never happened

The constitutional balance between civil and military in Japan was unclear and wobbly. The 1920s saw civilian predominance after the army made almost as much of a mess of invading Siberia as the Americans are making in Afghanistan now. But then its 1931 success in Manchuria set it on a roll and the rest is (for Japan
catastrophic) history.
So the scenario-builder's puzzle is whether the analogy will work right to the end-game. Shall we end with a humiliated China put back in its place, and the true realization of the End of History, the global triumph of the traditions of Greece. Rome and Judea? Or might we get a world which acknowledges Confucius and Mencius, rather than Plato and Aristotle as the origins of what will then count as the "modern" civilization of Mankind?

Let me briefly list the reasons why, if I were likely to enjoy the proceeds, I would bet on the latter.
1. Respective GNP growth prospects of US and
China. Look up any estimates of China's date of overtake and the rate at which, for some years, China's lead will increase.

2. Superior capacity of Chinese leaders to capture
increasing shares of GNP as government revenue. China seems to have no Tea Parties or even Congresssman Ryans.

3. Superior capacity of China's PLA, backed up by
popular resentful nationalism, to capture large share of government revenue, as compared even with what Eisenhower called America's "military-industrial complex",

4. Consequently greater Chinese capacity to devote
some of the best brains of the population to military weapons research rather than to devising new derivatives and other more arcane financial weapons of mass destruction.

5. Greater likelihood that in China those best
brains will be not only captured, but well-trained for weapons research. When Japan started breaking through technology frontiers in 1970 it was producing a fifth of a million university graduates, a third in science and engineering. Unesco reports China's graduates in
2009 as 7.7 million and the proportion from science and engineering is unlikely to be less than a third.

Those are all good reasons for expecting that the denouement will not be a replay of the 1945 moment when the upstart is smashed at terrible cost, nor of the 1990 moment when the competition is ended and the status quo restored by the upstart's surrender. There is a very good chance that this time the upstart will win.

What we have to worry about is how it wins. American macho popular democracy is not all that likely to breed a Gorbachev who recognizes when he is beaten and peacefully surrenders hegemony in the West Pacific, as Gorbachev did in eastern and central Europe. And the consequences of the cold war becoming hot could be unimaginably devastating.

The chances of a peaceful denouement and a smooth cession of hegemony would be greatly increased if Japan switched sides and ceased to be America's front-line military base. There seems to be small prospect of that. The current consensus of the Japanese establishment, as typified in Yoichi Funabashi's article in the FT (18 May), is that the US-Japan military alliance is no obstacle to closer relations with China, indeed may usefully intimidate China into seeking good relations with Japan.

To which one can only say: sancta simplicitas. It is good for Japan that its 1902-1945 experience cured it of proud and resentful nationalism and made that no longer the driver of its foreign policy. But that should not prevent it recognizing the force of such sentiments in Chinese policy today.

The last Japanese prime minister who had the slightest chance of developing the sort of personal relations with Chinese leaders that approaches in trust and frankness that between Cameron and, say, Merkel or Sarkozy, was Fukuda. When he visited China in 2007 he went to Confucius's birthplace. Photographs showed him displaying a large banner he had inscribed in his quite respectable calligraphy with a near-quotation from the Analects. Confucius' aphorism was "Foster Tradition and Understand the New". Fukuda substituted "Create" for "Understand". I've never had a chance to ask him what sort of "New" he had in mind.

Ronald Dore