Pick up any decent newspaper. Go to any worthy business website. Meet any informed business leader. One word has been their common language for the last 2 years, may be more. China.

Everyone has a point of view about it’s future, it’s impact on global commerce and community and its government.

For some, Chinese success flies in the face of their capitalist values. Nearly twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain, Communism still terrifies people. The power of the government is spooky, they say. The economic growth trajectory can not possibly last, they cry. So many urban mouths to feed, its little wonder the price of commodities is going through the roof, they protest. And if they don’t stop polluting, they’ll kill us all, they scream.

Telling China what it should be doing to control its markets, its people and its ambitions has become a political and media sport. People are making a very decent living out of it.

All of which made Henry Kissinger’s comments in the Financial Times this weekend past, just a little more poignant.

“China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do”.