China's neighbors are scared, and a look at the recent past reveals good reasons for that fear. Over the last three decades China has simultaneously solved its population and economic problems. The "one child" program prevented the birth of at least 400 million Chinese. As the current 1.3 billion Chinese note the problems they are having with land and resource shortages, they cannot help but be grateful that there are not 1.7 billion Chinese. At the same time police and bureaucrats were tormenting parents who even thought about having more than one child, the government revived China's market economy, presided over by a Communist Party that stood Marxism on its head and didn't give it a second thought (anyone who did, was shot or sent off to a work camp for "reeducation.") China now has the third largest economy in the world.

For the last decade, China has been reforming and expanding its military. The neighbors who witnessed the population control and economic reform (neither of which any of the contemporary experts believed possible), consider it likely that the Chinese will, in the next two decades, become a military superpower. Japan, India and Taiwan, in particular, are not too happy about that.