Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” famously made a prediction in 2001 that the Communist Party would fall from power in a decade.

Shinzo Abe, widely viewed as a right-wing nationalist, assumes office this week as prime minister of Japan, the seventh time the country's leadership has changed hands in six years and his second turn at the helm since 2007.

China's dispatch of a marine surveillance plane into the airspace of islands administered by Japan appears to be part of a high-risk plan to create a situation whereby Japan's claim to effectively control the Senkaku Islands is put in doubt.

New Chinese leader Xi Jinping is assuming the mantle of a reformer, visiting Shenzhen, adjoining Hong Kong, which pioneered China's economic reform movement more than 30 years ago, on his first trip outside of the capital.

China's new leader Xi Jinping has issued a call for action to realize “the cause of national rejuvenation,” which he called “the greatest dream for the Chinese nation in modern history.”

The installation of a new generation of leaders in China, albeit still incomplete, provides an opportunity for change in the Sino-American relationship, now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected.

The current leadership transition in China is widely described as a once-a-decade changeover, as though it is rooted in convention if not in law.

China is laying a claim to human resources around the world that no other country can match: 50 million ethnic Chinese, mostly citizens of other countries whom Beijing sees as “sons and daughters of the Chinese nation.”

Forty years ago, the archconservative American President Richard M. Nixon shocked the country and the world by visiting communist China, a country that the United States did not recognize and whose soldiers had fought American soldiers in the Korean War.

While the world's attention has been focused on the rivalry between China and Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, Taiwan — which has the same territorial claims as China — has come up with what it calls a “peace initiative” involving all three parties.