With Reg Little and Kevin Rudd being diplomats, I now realise anyone can become one given an opportunity, as more accurately putting the pieces together about international relations and the international economy does not seem to be important.

Reg, forget the rest, the West is 'still' the best. We just need to redefine our direction. Hopefully we will.

The Chinese are beating the west, because they have a different culture to the Western Judeo Christian culture which has instilled the concept of guilt for seeking self interest.

The Chinese think that this is nuts. Greed has always been good for the Chinese. They even worship Tsai Shen, the God of Wealth. Could you imagine the Chinese sticking a statue to their God of Wealth in Hyde Park, beside St Mary's cathedral? Multiculturalism or no, Cardinal Pell would have a fit.

That self interest is the prime motivator in Chinese behaviour might be discerned by comparing the Japanese warrior to the Chinese warrior. In Japan, the warrior class was the finest sort of human being, who would willingly sacrifice his life for his Lord. The Chinese were more practical. Soldiers are just scum who can't find any other way of gaining employment.

Central to Chinese self image is that they are a race apart. The Chinese believe in Evolution, but their version is different to what is accepted in the West. They accept that most humans evolved from homo erectus in Africa, but they maintain that the Chinese evolved in China from homo erectus. That is what is taught in their schools. The very thought that Chinese would have black ancestors is just too much for the Chinese.

The richest people on planet Earth are the "overseas Chinese". These Chinese are renowned for their intense nationalism in every country they live in. The only problem is, that they are intensely loyal to China. The USA has now experienced a string of "defections" from "Chinese Americans" in sensitive defence position to China. This involves technology in ICBM's, nuclear submarine design, genetics, and Stealth technologies.

While liberals in the West display their moral superiority by always being opposed to their nations, and their races, self interest, the Chinese take the opposite view. While western liberals want to destroy capitalism and create a socialist welfare state, the Chinese are just emerging from that debilitating condition and embracing the capitalism which once made the west strong.

That is why they are beating us.

PCR is eminently qualified to comment on the dissolution and implosion of capitalism and the West.

Most Australians cling to their 1945 worship of the U.S. They can't get their tiny minds around the fact that the U.S. is an enemy of the free world and is pushing us towards a nuclear war as it tries to squeeze China out of the mix of potential superpowers.

It will be interesting to see how many comments this excellent, topical article receives from the OLO intelligentsia!

is that why many of the rich chinese also want to live in the west, and love flaunting rich western goods.

Sure the west may have lost the plot, for now, but lets not kid ourselves that the chinese model is superior. China has just merely exploited the longstanding flaws associated with trade with a mercantile system while we kid ourselves that all will be okay if we follow an ideal.

But the west will change, albeit Australia will just follow events led by more powerful Western states or entities (US and EU). Change will be incremental, but it is happening

Nice post Lego. You are so correct, you only have to visit the Chung Wah Association in Perth, or their equivalent in other Australian cities to realise this. I suggest reading posts on the 'Asian Wind' forum to anyone who thinks that Asians abide by any code of conduct other than extreme self interest (racism). Chinese do indeed think they are a race apart and abhore and ridicule any suggestion their distant relatives may have been black. That their culture and creed is manifestly superior is not even taken as a 'given' - to them it is simply part of the natural order; a necessary truth. Why, Oh why, are we importing them faster than Julia Gillard can switch positions beggars belief. The West will go down in history as the only civilisation to have sacrificed itself on its own ideals of equality by programmes of mass immigration schemes of peoples who believe just the opposite. These immigration policies are foisted onto the populations without our consent and anyone who dares question their value is denounced and ridiculed - Pauline Hanson to name one. Thomas Jefferson once wrote: 'Those who turn their guns into ploughs will end up ploughing for those who do not.'

Here we go again, the West is in terminal decline.

About the only reliable characteristic of economic predictions is that they're notoriously unreliable. Let's see how long BRICS holds together, most likely, all, or most of its members will falter due to inherent institutional inefficiencies.
I've seen all this before, Japan's Confucian culture was supposed to be the key to the county's phenomenal post war economic development and the 'experts' predicted that it would eventually overtake the US--the reality is 20 years of economic stagnation.

".. many educated Asians do not find it difficult to master the West's comparatively simplistic abstract rational thought."

Europe's "comparatively simplistic abstract rational thought" produced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, Liberal Democracy and the Industrial Revolution.

The West, with its remarkable capacity for introspection, will probably outlast BRICS or any handy acronym that economic "forecasters" invent. Russia will be the first initial to disappear from BRICS and if the Chinese oligarchy can't manage the country's transformation, the "C' will disappear soon as well.

I'd put my money on Western hegemony.