Today - 2 April 2009 - may yet be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power. Just a few months ago, the talk in western capitals was still about graciously inviting China to join the western club of G7 plus Russia. Now G20 is widely accepted as the new top table of world politics, and China is already seen as one of the biggest players at that table. The question now is: what kind of world power will China be?
Until recently, China's official policy was of demonstrative modesty - the dragon as gecko. Yes, it sought a "harmonious world", no less, but China's best service to that end, it suggested, was its own peaceful domestic development. China was outspoken only on issues that related directly to its own economic development and immediate state interests. Now it seems to be moving gingerly beyond the paradigm of developmental modesty. As, in this crisis, the world asks more of it, so it starts to ask more of the world.
The most striking example is a recent article by the country's central bank governor, suggesting the creation of a supra-sovereign international reserve currency "that is disconnected from individual nations". In other words, not the US dollar. The idea of extending the IMF model of special drawing rights based on a basket of currencies has been widely mooted - not least by a UN panel headed by Joseph Stiglitz, as outlined recently in these pages. But this idea does acquire a particular complexion when it is China's central bank governor who suggests toppling the US dollar from its throne. In London yesterday, Gordon Brown and president Hu Jintao discussed giving China more voting weight in the IMF, in return for a larger financial contribution. An eminently reasonable suggestion.
This February Xi Jinping, China's vice-president and heir presumptive to Hu Jintao, sounded off to a Chinese audience in Mexico about rich, powerful countries "messing around" with poorer ones. Now who could he be thinking of? Last year a senior official in China's defence ministry said the world should not be surprised if China builds its own aircraft carrier. Beijing and Washington have publicly locked horns about the level of Chinese defence spending. At the same time, the Chinese are fascinated by the idea, originally promoted by an American scholar, of a G2 within the G20. China and the United States - this Group of Two - should be to the world what the Franco-German couple used to be to Europe.
China is also investing more in public diplomacy, with nearly 300 Confucius Institutes around the world, increased international broadcasting, and Chinese leaders placing op-ed pieces in western newspapers. "Soft power" is well on the way to becoming a Chinese phrase. So in all three key dimensions of power - economic, military and soft - China is stepping up its game.
There's many a slip twixt cup and lip. China has so far weathered the economic crisis better than America. Millions of suddenly unemployed migrant workers have not yet shaken the system. But bigger tests are still to come. Stephen Roach, a seasoned American observer of the Chinese economy, says it grew in the last quarter of 2008 by "a number very close to zero", when compared with the previous quarter.
In the longer run, the Chinese question of questions remains: can you continue to combine command politics with market economics? Or, to frame it more positively: can you achieve a controlled, step-by-step evolution of this political system into one that is more responsive, transparent, accountable and therefore durable?
Let us optimistically assume, for the sake of argument, that China masters these domestic challenges and continues its peaceful rise. What then? What kind of world power would it wish to be? Nobody knows, not even the Chinese. The answer will depend on a generation of leaders not yet in power, and on younger Chinese whose views are scarcely formed. One cannot simply extrapolate forward from the attitudes of older generations seared by memories of colonialism, civil war and the cultural revolution.
It seems likely that for the foreseeable future China will continue to put a very high value on unquestioned sovereignty (of the kind most European states no longer practise or preach), on the unity of the motherland (including Tibet), on a many-holds-barred kind of respect (being sensitive to any hint of colonial-style humiliation), and on the requirements of its own economic development. So long as cross-straits relations with Taiwan can be improved by political and economic means, China - unlike Russia - shows no signs of being a revisionist, let alone an expansionist, power. Its current foreign policy style, though often stubborn, is peaceful, cautious, pragmatic and evolutionary.
Beyond this, no one knows how China will behave as a major player in the international system when it is called upon, whether it likes it or not, to speak and act on issues far removed from its domestic concerns. Unlike in the case of the US, Britain or France, China's history of the last 200 years does not offer a set of foreign policy traditions - such as the Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian ones detected in US foreign policy by Walter Russell Mead - that are reference points for future action as a great power. Some analysts, western and Chinese, attempt to reach further back into Chinese history, to the traditions of Confucianism or so-called legalism, to discover buried cultural signposts. Intriguing though this is, the leap is a big one.
So it's a fair guess that Chinese policymakers will make their tradition up as they go along. If Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic recipe for domestic reform was "crossing the river by feeling for the stones", China will cross the oceans by testing the water as it goes. This means that a great deal will depend on the welcome it gets from the powers that still set much of the agenda of world politics, especially the United States and the European Union. In short, the process of defining what kind of world power China becomes will be deeply interactive.
What, for example, is the attitude to a more united European foreign policy? "It depends" is the answer I receive here from some of China's best-informed Europe specialists. It depends above all on Europe's political attitude to China. That is even truer of the younger generation of China's elites, eager to study in and learn from the west - before going on to do things their own way.
So the next decade, the 2010s, will be formative. Starting in London today, we in the west should welcome China as a big player and full participant in the liberal international order that has been built since 1945. Far from resisting Chinese requests for a larger voice in international organisations, we should offer it ourselves. Then we should patiently and consistently, across the whole decade, make the argument that the essentials of liberal international order reflect not merely western but rather universal values. That was the claim of the Enlightenment, and I believe it to be true. This will not be easy, especially on the most sensitive issues inside China's frontiers - but today's China is full of sharp and open minds. There is still everything to play for.
Timothy Garton Ash