“Medium black for here”, is my order at the coffee shop. “Do you want that in a china mug?”, comes the question. The reply is in the affirmative even when it is rollup the-rim season for paper cups. I know that it will, in fact, be an English-made ‘beaker’ that will be taken to my usual table by the ‘drive thru’ lane. See the underside of an empty one.

The vessel from which that coffee is imbibed (‘drunk’ seems inappropriate at 9 a.m.) does not have the feel one associates with a china cup. Pottery or crockery are something else. Such utensils may share a glazed surface with porcelain, the aristocrat of tableware ceramics which was, among so many other things, invented in China. They do not have the delicate, translucent quality of the product that Europeans learned to imitate only in the 18th Century. The names Dresden, Sèvres, Spode and Wedgwood come to mind. Perhaps, Capo di Monte and Belleek.

All of the above was suggested by last week’s cover story in The Economist. “Facing up to China” was the heading, although it had nothing to do with dinnerware. It concerned the economy of the land where mandarins were using porcelain dishes and cups when the ancestors of our declining Europebased population were still using wooden platters and drinking horns.

Everybody knows that the financial clout of China is now second only to that of the United States. Whereas a century ago ‘the Middle Kingdom’ was the victim of European exploitation and drug trafficking, and within the memory of some, was being invaded by Japan, what is now the People’s Republic of China is a creditor nation, a major would-be investor in Canada’s natural resources and a threat to the effectiveness of the U.N.

Barak Obama faced reported “rude behaviour” from Chinese officials at the Copenhagen climate summit. Matthew Glass’s current novel, Ultimatum, imagines the two superpowers negotiating warily as they fail to cope with the global warming and rising sea levels that could be universally disastrous. The message is that with a “No; you first” attitude on both sides, a global catastrophe could occur before any corrective measures are agreed upon.

Is it all a tempest in a china mug? As The Economist puts it, ”It would be wrong to suggest that the two countries see eye-to-eye on all or even most big issues or to rule out dangerous falling-out in the future”. The mater of continued U.S., arming of Taiwan which Beijing sees as a secessionist state and a growing upsurge of anti-Western sentiment that could threaten a non-responsive Chinese government are factors to watch.

So is the possibility that China might impulsively overestimate its military strength or misjudge Washington’s willingness to wage war on yet another front.

Han Suyin (born 1917) is the pen name of the daughter of a Flemish mother and a Chinese father educated as an engineer in Belgium. A prolific writer, her partly autobiographical 1952 novel, A Manysplendoured Thing, was the basis of a 1955 film and of the song “Love is . . . “. In the later 1965 novel, The Crippled Tree, she speaks of “the immense continuum that is China”.

The three millennium long history of successive dynasties and “warring states” periods is as difficult to follow and as interesting as is that of ancient Egypt. The land of the pharaohs, however, did not produce the lasting legal, philosophical, administrative developments that justify the use of the word “continuum”.

Europeans did not ‘catch up’ with China until long after Nicolo and Marco Polo’s 13th Century travels in ‘Cathay’. Its paper making, movable type, tea, porcelain, gunpowder and silk, not to mention potatoes, tobacco, maize and peanuts, the discovery of which is often assigned elsewhere, led to the establishing of overland trade routes and the search for access by sea - and, thus, the finding of the Americas.

The Ming (1350-1640) and Manchu (1640-1912) dynasties eventually succumbed to European pressures. The British, Russian, French, German and other “foreign devils” forced the subjection of China to treaties and open ports that undermined a conservative Confucian civilisation. Britain took possession of Burma and Hong Kong, Russia parts of Mongolia, the French of Vietnam (Indo-China) and Japan of Taiwan (Formosa).

European, American and Japanese troops occupied Beijing (Peking) after the 1900 ‘Boxer’ (‘Righteous Raised Fists’) Rebellion against foreigners. Subsequent demands for internal reform were resisted until a republic was proclaimed in 1911. Thereafter, Japanese aggression and internal conflict with the Chinese Communists dominated the mid 20th Century until the Mao Zedung’s People’s Republic was proclaimed in 1949.

The continued Chinese suspicion of resident foreigners is not surprising, nor is the government’s disregard for religious and political ideas that come from abroad. Even thoughtful, educated (often Christian mission-educated) reformers were critical of the post- Manchu revolutionary Sun Yatsen and his pro-Western son-in-law, Chiang Kaishek, whose Kuomintang republic survives in Taiwan.

In The Crippled Tree Han Suyin tells the story of China’s 19th Century humiliation through the reminiscences of her father and uncles. “England’s ugly role in the building of the railways in China, like that of the Opium Wars, is not pleasant”, she wrote. “It has left emotional sores, raw places where old wounds quickly rub new again. But no Western country can be singled out for perverseness in this matter. As for the United States, it was not yet the power it is today. But they [Western nations] were all the same”.

My coffee shop ‘china mug’ may come from the Staffordshire potteries but fewer goods – clothing, cutlery, children’s story books – come nowadays from the U.K. You have noticed how many things you buy were made in China. The undervalued Chinese yuan (¥), among other things, makes them attractive. We can each choose a domestic rather than a foreign product but there could be a dangerous backlash against official trade sanctions that would reopen some of those raw memories and old wounds.

Above all, our shared journey on Spaceship Earth makes us internationally interdependent. The best relationship between fellow voyagers is a negotiated win-win rather than any win-lose situation.