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Furthermore, China had already made heavy commitments to opening its economy, starting the first round of talks for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor for the WTO, in October 1986. While there were dire warnings of China closing its doors again, and existing in splendid isolation, the template of mutual dependence and coexistence was already embedded. The USA, after dallying with the idea of punitive sanctions, held back – restricting these only to the sale of 19 The Rise of the Dragon military equipment.

It was a war that echoes to this day, colouring the relations between Japan and China. In 2005, there were violent clashes in Beijing when the Japanese Prime Minister visited the Yakusuni Shrine in Tokyo, the site of the graves of several Japanese war criminals. To compound this dark history, after the victory over Japan in 1945, republican China had its own internal contradictions to settle, suffering a further four years of civil war between the Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek, and the Communists under Mao Zedong.

There is simply no precedent. One difference between China now, and over two centuries ago, however, is that China has become a massive importer of goods, which it either uses on the consumer market, or simply (in the majority of cases) processes, assembles or re-manufactures, and then reexports. In order to build this economic model, China has also become hungry for resources abroad, something that has fuelled many of its overseas investments. As the rest of this book will show, how China manages this transition, a transition that has been ongoing, in many ways, since the 1940s, will be a key theme for global development in the years ahead.