Spare me the usual myopic line born of American xenophobia and ignorance about China being dependent on exports to the USA. There is neither time nor space here to go into the detail of these four presentations, but Dines quickly dispatches such nonsense, pointing out that net exports' contribution to China's growth over the past decade has averaged just 1.5 per cent. And the United States' share of China's exports is 20 per cent so the much ballyhooed American consumer is only good for 0.3 per cent of China's GDP growth - growth that runs along in double digits or close to it even in the Great Recession. That's only part of it. The stuff China exports to the US is mainly low value-added – clothing, toys, electronic gadgets. About half of China's exports now go to the developing world and that half has higher value-added content – power stations, mining machinery and the like. Dines, an old China hand at just 53 thanks to starting in 1978, professes dismay at the West's conceit in its dealings with China. We just don't get it, don't understand how fundamentally the game has changed, how little China needs of us. The real export story echoes a Power point (I know, it's a cheap line, but I couldn't resist it) that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been visiting Beijing to investigate buying high-speed trains for California. Even the low-value export story to the west is changing, but the domestic demand story is so very much bigger. Michael Power is a seasoned performer on the economic big picture stage – he could pass for Michael Gambon's younger brother with the actor's talent for phrasing – and tells the story well with the pertinent illustrations.

An example of his examples: if you've been half tuned-in to the state of the world, you'd know that more cars are sold in China now than the US. That's already history. The insight that's worth thinking about is that car ownership penetration in China is only 3 per cent, 80 per cent of buyers are purchasing their first-ever car and 90 per cent pay cash. Not only is it a massive market, it's ungeared and untapped. (Power passes on advice he was given before visiting China: you have to learn to handle BFNs. The B stands for Big and the N stands for Numbers. The numbers on everything are huge. If you're nice to Investec, they might let you have a copy of his 75 slides from last night's show with lots of BFNs, or you can get the gist of what he's on about from his blog.) RBA assistant governor economic, Dr Philip Lowe, also is a dab hand at telling a telling example. There were several in his Asian growth implications speech last October that helped make it compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand where we are and where we could be going, instead of just fluffing around with transient headlines. His NatStats speech last Thursday was something of an update on the October job. The idea of the greenback being the safe haven currency is simply bemusing, it's so last century We have a family saying that everyone tends to value opinions that agree with their own. Thus I'll happily quote Lowe:

“At a general level, the importance of Asia to Australia is now well understood. Despite this, it remains the case that the financial news from the United States and Europe dominates our newspapers and our airwaves. With this constant flow of information about the North Atlantic, it is sometimes easy to forget just how profound – and important to Australia – are the structural changes taking place in Asia.” I think the good doctor is being kind. Among the illustrative snapshots on offer this time: Over the past 30 years, nearly 400 million Chinese have moved to the cities. There are some 170 Chinese cities now with more than one million residents compared with only 35 in all of Europe. The urbanisation process has a long way to run with another 300 to 400 million people expected to move from the country to the city over the next 20 years. A typical 90 square-metre apartment in China requires about six tonnes of steel. Every tonne of steel requires around 1.7 tonnes of iron ore and more than half a tonne of coking coal. You can work it out from there. And that's just high-rise apartments. China is building railways like no-one ever has and every 10km of metropolitan subway requires about 75,000 tonnes of steel. And so on. To state what should be obvious to us: “These developments in China are being closely observed in Australia, including at the Reserve Bank. A decade or so ago, we spent a lot of time puzzling over why quarterly movements in Australian GDP were so highly correlated with quarterly movements in US GDP. We don't puzzle over this anymore – not because we solved the puzzle, but because the correlation has fallen. At the same time, the correlation between quarterly movements in Australian and Chinese GDP has steadily increased. Clearly what happens in the Australian economy is now more dependent upon what happens in China than has been the case at any time in our past.”

Emerging Asia is our economy now and will continue to be, as regular visitors to this column are probably sick of reading. But on top of the changing relative importance of the US to us is the declining absolute importance of the US. (This is me postulating now, echoing some of Power, not the more circumspect RBA.) Wall Street still calls the sentiment tune, but with the threat of more quantitative easing (ie printing money), the US is undermining its claim to the baseline of global capitalism – the “risk free” US government bond. It's not risk free when its value is being eroded. The idea of the greenback being the safe haven currency is simply bemusing, it's so last century. It takes time for the massive changes we are witnessing to work their way through the systems, with plenty of disruptions along the way, but it takes even longer for most of us to comprehend that it's happening. The current India headlines are very reasonably about the Commonwealth Games fiasco. Governments of all kinds need a crisis from time to time to be kicked into action – maybe an extremely embarrassing Commonwealth Games crisis will be good for India if it results in the smashing of walls of inefficiency, red tape and corruption, lifting the nation with 30 per cent of the world's children into the next stage of growth. But in the meantime it would be foolish to let a few hastily and shoddily built sporting facilities overshadow the existing importance of the nation to us, let alone the future. A final quick reminder from the RBA Bulletin: Everyone knows China is our biggest trade partner now, most don't know that we have a bigger trade surplus with India.

A factoid from an Economist magazine cover story last month: In 1990 two-trade between India and China was just $US270 million. It's expected to be more than $US60 billion this year. Think you know the Chindia story? Betcha don't – no-one really does because it's simply too big to fully grasp and it's still being written. Besides, “Chindia” is only part of the story with the rest of emerging Asia deserving fat volumes as well. Loading Here's something you never gonna forget,

B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen nuthin' yet. Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor.