China's economy is more dependent on foreign countries than on the Chinese. The threat to China is greater from the Chinese than from abroad. This is the picture you get when you compare the GDP with the state budget in the economy that, during this decade, is expected to surpass the U.S. and become the world's largest. China sells more to foreigners than to its own people. The armed police, intended to quell domestic uprisings, this year has a larger budget than the military. This indicates the complexity of the amazing success story that China represents, and which in the future will probably be called the world’s political change of the 2000s.

First, a historical perspective: for a long time, China was the world's largest economy along with India but, with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, India's textile sector was destroyed and later the more diversified Chinese economy. The beginning of China’s descent was in the Opium Wars of th...