Last year, while Sino-Japanese trade reached $343 billion, the China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) commercial exchanges increased to $363 billion. China's economic ties are on the rise with Central Asia and its trade with Russia and India will approach $100 billion each by 2015.

The uncertainties in the global economy and the persisting turbulence in the euro zone have pushed Northeast Asia toward collective rebalancing and diversification. This significant redefinition of commercial and financial flows was not a planned scheme targeting any adversary, but simply a reaction to the West's economic deficiencies.

China, Japan and South Korea have agreed to promote the use of their foreign exchange reserves to invest in each other's government bonds. The three countries accounting for 70 percent of Asian GDP are also moving toward the establishment of a trilateral free trade area (FTA). Beijing and Seoul have already announced the launch of FTA talks, which are expected to be completed before the end of 2014. China and Japan have started direct trading of their currencies in a policy which boosts trade ties between Asia's two biggest economies.

The new Northeast Asian dynamics also re-design the Southeast Asian landscape. Along with the 10 ASEAN members, China, Japan and South Korea agreed on the occasion of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank to expand a regional liquidity safety net by doubling the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization agreement to $240 billion.

The highly indebted United States—more than 100 percent of its GDP and on track to add three times more debt than the euro zone over the next 5 years—chooses to create conditions for the bipolarization of the Asia-Pacific region 20 years after the end of the Cold War. But instead of a "pivot to Asia," the United States should have conceived a refocus on the American economy, the real long-term threat to American national security, and beyond, a rethinking with European leaders of Atlantic relations.

Chinese centrality

Fundamentally, while contemporary China has learned to coexist with the West and continues to use it as a catalyst for the renewal of its ancient civilization, the West has not yet fully accepted the reality of a sui generis Chinese modernity which marks the limit of its global expansion.

While the West clings to the notion that "either you are like us or you are against us," Chinese traditional wisdom has prepared the Middle Kingdom to avoid such a dualistic mindset.

In a Chinese context, management, governance, and more generally, the vision of international relations are deeply influenced by the "Tao of Centrality," a philosophy and a practice whose aim is to balance the opposites and to mediate between contradictory forces. The intelligence of centrality presupposes contrary forces, but as it targets equilibrium and harmony, it transcends the logic of exclusive opposition. The grandeur of the "Tao of Centrality" would not be in a victory of the East against the West but in their mutual nourishment.

In a global village where the absolute domination of one power over the others has become impossible, and where interdependence has considerably increased the price of tensions, the "Tao of Centrality" is a source of powerful effectiveness.

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is often quoted with a statement that he probably never uttered and which has become a misleading cliché: "When China awakes, the world will shake." However, China is neither a revolutionary force nor a power intoxicated by some Nietzschean will to shape a new global order.

As, in the unambiguous words of U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in early June, "All of the U.S. military services are focused on implementing the president's guidance to make the Asia-Pacific a top priority," China concentrates on its domestic transformation and, gradually, peacefully, regains centrality.

Although the counterproductive "pivot to Asia" complicates Sino-Western relations, it is not too late for the West to apprehend the Chinese renaissance with wisdom. It would not only contribute to its revitalization, but it would also take the global system into an unprecedented era of cooperation and prosperity.

The author is director of the Academia Sinica Europaea at the China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, and founder of the Euro-China Forum

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