Taiwan is in the center of China's megatrend

China is expected to surpass Japan and become the second largest economy in the world this year or the next. In the latest issue of Forbes magazine, China's President Hu Jintao is ranked the second most powerful person in the world after President Barack Obama of the United States.

The rapid increase of China's economic and cultural influence in the world is described by Societe Generale strategist Dylan Grice as similar to the rise of Japan in the 1980s, only much larger in scale. It represents not only the rise of a nation but a geopolitical shift of power from the West to the East.

Even Hollywood picked up the trend. In “2012,” the latest of a streak of apocalypse movies this year, the manufacturing might of China is credited for saving the human species.

In his new book, co-authored by his wife, “China's Megatrend,” John Naisbitt, the world's leading expert in futures studies and the author of the phenomenal “Megatrend” in 1982, suggested that China's success challenges Francis Fukuyama's theory that the triumph of Western democracy over communism was the “End of History,” the end point of socio-cultural evolution.

With a “vertical democracy” (as opposite to the “horizontal democracy” in the West), in which problems are addressed with both top-down and bottom-up approaches and a company culture, the Chinese government is able to focus on the work at hand, Naisbitt claimed, as opposed to Western democracies where long-term plans are often interrupted by election-driven politics.

Statistics seem to support Naisbitt's view so far. While most Western economies are still licking theirs wounds in the wake of the global financial meltdown, China is going to hit a 10 percent growth in the fourth quarter and will probably keep its annual growth rate at 8.3 percent, which is within the government's target of 8 percent.

However, what Naisbitt and the unending growth of the Chinese economy in the 21st century do not show is that the focus on success is actually China's Achilles' Heel.

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