The Chinese will have the USA to thank if they become a hyperpower

That China is not applying the "mainstream" economic policies which the Americans have spread around the world is obvious. Only to that extent may the Chinese policies be said to be "exotic" or to be an "evolution to an unknown world."

What they have done and are doing is to encourage fixed-capital investment and to join public and private fixed-capital investment on the road to rapid and domestically sustainable development.

The ambitious infrastructure plans of the Beijing government contrast with the way in which vital infrastructure in the United States has been allowed to run down. Even if a robust start were made right now to restore United States infrastructure, it would take several to many years - according to their own official calculations - to restore it to the levels of a decade or so ago.

Here we have the clues to the grasping of the opportunity that the United States presented.

China has not buried itself in the past and stultified its own economic, social, political and strategic development. Nor has it made a mad dash into the future, with the chaos that we have seen, for example, in Russia and some other components of the late Soviet Union. Above all, it has been astute enough not to swallow whole the theories, concepts and policies of mainstream economics, especially as expressed in the United States.

At the moment at least, it appears that China has formulated a melange of policies - a "mixed economy" with ingredients mingled in a particularly skilful way - that will carry it forward, even if the world economy falters and perhaps even if it undergoes a substantial collapse in the next few years.

Such a collapse, involving the United States, might provide another opportunity, inadvertently offered by the United States, for China to stride towards unprecedented greatness and to become the new, single hyperpower of the 21st century.