It’s probably about time I learned to speak Mandarin.

According to research just published by the Conference Board, a highly respected research institute, the Chinese economy will overtake that of the poor old US by 2012 in terms of output.

It’s quite funny then that President Obama, having fared so miserably at the mid-term elections and with an economy that is sputtering along, should boldly dictate to his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, about the way to manage his affairs. It’s like me trying to tell Warren Buffet how to invest in the stock market; pointless, fruitless, misguided, presumptuous, and quite frankly downright cheeky.

Obama has an overdraft of $4.7 trillion, and that’s set to rise by at LEAST $600 billion over the next few months. Hu has a rather healthy positive balance of $2.6 trillion which is being shrewdly and strategically invested via sovereign wealth funds all over the world.

The Americans are very good at blaming other people for their woes. Those nasty Chinese are not allowing their currency to strengthen and therefore their motor bikes, jeans, rubber ducks, and male potency tablets are all so cheap that the world just can’t help but buy them. Obama and Cameron and Greenspan and Geithner would have the Chinese spend more at home in order to boost domestic consumption and thus soak up the goods destined for the West. And they want those stupid Chinese to save less. Good point Barack; imagine the appalling state of affairs that has a country working hard, spending little, saving money, and being prosperous. It’s so darn un-American.

The 30^th anniversary of the formation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone has recently been celebrated. The visionary Deng Xiaoping chose the tiny fishing village close to Hong Kong to be the start of the Chinese industrial and economic revolution. It offered favourable incentives to businesses to set up there, set up massive infrastructure to encourage investment, and is generally credited with the spark that ignited the Chinese economy. It now has a population of 9 million.

Since 1980 China has gone from nowhere to being on the cusp of being the world’s biggest economy, and while there’ll be hiccups on the way, I believe it’ll be No.1 for a LONG time.

Which means of course that Hu is perfectly justified in responding to the West’s protestations with the popular Manadarin exclamation “Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai!”

(F**k your ancestors to 18 generations!)

It’s a lovely language.