Promise, potential, performance

He also says that it will not be long before China has its own global brands that will challenge those in the West.

"I think things like WeChat (a China messaging service already successful in countries like India) has the potential to become globally recognized. There are also a number of other Chinese brands that have already made their mark such as (telecommunications company) Huawei and Lenovo in computers. I think most of China's future strong brands will come from the private sector."

Mitter at Oxford believes there is often a failure to detect a new self-confidence in China, particularly among the middle class in cities like Shanghai.

"You have this figure that some 60 percent of Americans don't have a passport and have no intention of traveling abroad. You could contrast this with China's middle class being very outward looking. People in Shanghai now regard internationalism and cosmopolitanism as part of their own make up," he says.

"They would be the first to concede that this is not an attitude coming from a farming background in the center of Ningxia (Hui autonomous region)."

Jacques argues there is still a failure in the West to recognize the challenge that China now poses.

He says many commentators are still locked into a mentality that the West will always rule since that has been the case since Britain became the first industrial nation more than 200 years ago.

"The greatest single problem facing the West this century is to stop looking down on China from a Western perspective rather than actually trying to understand it. I think Westerners are going to find it extremely difficult because for the last 200 years they have never really had to think about any culture being dominant other than their own."

Mathews at Addis Ababa University says China so far has been happy to go along with the Western created and dominated system.

"I think in the future China may play a bigger role and we might have a more China-dominated international system. The end of the 21st century is still a long way off. I think by then other countries will have emerged from Asia and even Africa and we might have a much more multi-polar world."