主题：【编辑】美国经济周报十月（一） -- 南方有嘉木

Tensions will get worse in the next few years for two reasons. The first is unavoidable: 2012 witnesses important political transitions in the form of elections in Taiwan and America and a Communist Party Congress in China. Second—and more generally—there has been a recalibration of perceived power. There is now talk of a G2 of China and America, implying that their global weights are nearly equal. In fact, as our special report argues, this is a misperception, and a dangerous one.

China’s economy is still less than a third the size of America’s at market exchange-rates. Its GDP per head is one-fourteenth that of America. The innovation gap between the two countries remains huge. America’s defence budget is still six times China’s. As for the Treasury bills, dumping them is not an option for China: a tumbling dollar would hurt its own economy (see article). And as American consumers spend less, while Chinese stimulus boosts its domestic spending, the huge and politically troublesome trade imbalances are shrinking. In the meantime, the danger of overegging China’s economic expansion abroad is that it will fuel protectionism at a time when American unemployment is painfully high.

In terms of geopolitical power, China has neither the clout nor the inclination to challenge America. Confidently though China’s leaders now strut the world stage, they remain preoccupied by simmering discontent at home: there are tens of thousands of protests each year. For all the economic progress, all sorts of tensions—social, cultural, demographic, even religious—haunt the regime and help explain why it resorts to nationalism so often. So it is odd, and wrong, that America’s approach towards China is driven by its own insecurities.

Same bed, different dreams—and one is stronger

A more confident approach is a bet on whose sort of system of government will prove ultimately stronger. At the moment China’s responses on the climate, the financial crisis and the emerging swine-flu pandemic have won it praise internationally. But they have also borne the hallmarks of an authoritarian system. For instance, on greenery, it is clear that if China had exposed its response to the rigours of democratic debate, it would have acted more slowly: China’s system enables it to mobilise huge resources and make politically difficult decisions. But an effective long-term response to climate change needs public understanding of the issues and a legal environment that allows foreign owners of green technologies to transfer them without fear of theft. China lacks both.