The visit of United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to Beijing in early January was not just to discuss sanctions against Iran. It was also to remind China and the rest of Asia that the US State Department has a new foreign policy initiative.
Since the end of last year, America's overseas attention has moved like some giant telescope sweeping across the sky, away from Iraq and Afghanistan, to refocus instead on the Pacific. The subtext is clear. China and America are now in direct competition for power and influence in Asia and elsewhere.
For China, this was to be expected. The country's leaders knew they had been fortunate so far. Since the late 1990s, China had been able to develop a role in the world largely unhindered because the only superpower's attention was distracted elsewhere.
Now the big bull is in China's shop. It risks doing substantial damage to its ambitions, both by accident and design, if it is not handled carefully.
The battle to come is not just over economic might, political influence and military reach. It will also rage over access to global resources such as energy, raw materials and water. Most critically, it will hinge on an issue vital to both sides - political and economic ideology.
As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote in the magazine Foreign Policy last November, in an article provocatively titled America's Pacific Century, 'the future of politics will be decided in Asia ... and the United States will be right at the centre of the action'. The US has thrown down the gauntlet and, superficially at least, it looks like an unfair contest. It controls a third of the world's wealth and a quarter of the global economy with just 5 per cent of the population. Its share of military spending is equal to the rest of the world put together.
