It's a story that grabs headlines, yet it is also one that in time will be seen as largely irrelevant. In the meantime, there is an unmistakable swagger about Chinese officialdom, verging on arrogance or even complacency. The "other superpower", as Chinese decision-makers tend now to call America, lies wounded and becalmed, bereft of political leadership, struggling to maintain an increasingly unaffordable entitlements system, and apparently unable to dig itself out of the economic quagmire.