China has never been a country satisfied simply by symbolic power, the kind you get when you win the World Cup, or by bringing home medals from the Olympics. Like any industrializing country, it wants the real thing: to hold the debts of large countries and to manufacture the world’s most consumed goods. It wants an impressive military and to be respected for its economic muscle.

Within a decade, economists expect China—whose GDP grows around seven percent a year—to become the world’s largest economy, overtaking the United States, which has growth of around three percent annually. As the planet’s most populous country holding the top economic spot, virtually every other nation would need to do business there, even if some