The Return of the Middle Kingdom in a Post-American World

Not long after the conclusion of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, I was invited by my friend Eric Xu, an editor at Shanghai's largest paper, The Xinmin Evening News , to attend a seminar in Shanghai with some of China's top philosophers and scholars. They had gathered to assess the powershift in China's self-image and in global esteem as a result of such a successful execution of the games. The following short essay reports on their views and puts them in historical perspective.