Gone are the days when the US president could visit Beijing as the unassailable top dog, able to lecture the Chinese on everything from human rights to an overvalued currency. As has become fashionable to note, events have instead obliged Barack Obama to play the role of washed-up debtor visiting his stern bank manager for yet another loan.

That analogy is useful. But it can be overdone. Certainly, the financial crisis has brought into sharp relief just how dependent the US has become on foreign creditors, chief among them China.

It has also sharpened the perception of what had been happening anyway, the relative decline of a US-centric west and the relative rise of a China-centric Asia. But the word relative is important. China, poor and riddled with internal contradictions, is not there yet, by a very long way.