Common sense in any language

We used to have a saying in the Anglosphere during the Cold War 1970s that optimists learned Russian while pessimists learned Chinese. It was a knowing, if flippant, expression of a contrary view that the Soviet Union was not the West's biggest challenger. Ultimately China would re-emerge as the dominant world power.

That seemed a ludicrously distant proposition at a time when China was emerging from the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and Richard Nixon, then US President, had only just initiated his pivot toward Beijing. After that started an era of reform and opening-up in China and the rest, as they say, is history.

Soviet power crumbled, the United States emerged as the lone superpower and China continued on an economic long march that is seeing it challenge the US in the present decade for the title of world's largest economy.