One reason why human beings are nowhere near as happy as other animals, according to Schopenhauer, is that whereas the latter live entirely in the present moment, humans are constantly carrying the past on their backs and planning, often anxiously, what to do in future. Animals enjoy their perpetually iterating present moments if these are pleasant, and endure them more easily if they are unpleasant because they have no expectation that they will continue being so, or might worsen.

One can grant that it is a - the? - human tragedy to have memory and foresight in a life of difficulty, but it is relevant to point out that difficult lives tend to be those that remember the wrong things and are not very good at foresight. Present moments are the richer for being freighted with good memories and enticing plans; that is why one imagines that the present moment of a cow chewing its cud in the shade lacks the depth, height and texture of a human equivalent pondering, let us say, a move to Los Angeles on the back of a $250m deal.

As with individuals, so with nations. The bovine option is to live in the present moment too much, forgetting to mount a high point periodically in order to survey the way ahead. The major Anglophone nations of the western world, and perhaps their European friends, are currently very distracted by Iraq and the Middle East generally, and by problems over oil and gas supplies both from there and an increasingly Mafia-like Russia intent on using its throttle-like grasp on pipe-lines to hold its neighbours to ransom. In consequence they appear not to notice that the future, which they could visit if they wished, lies on the banks of the Huangpu River, which flows muddily between the Bund and Pudong in China's business capital, Shanghai.

Proof: there was no US presence at last weekend's meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), which as "Asean plus three" - joined by China, Japan and South Korea, the three biggest players on East Street - met at Cebu as guests of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines. In what is one of the most telling and resonant remarks of this first decade of the century so far, she said, "We are very happy to have China as our Big Brother in this region."

How apt a phrase that is. Everyone knows about China's spectacular economic success in the last 10 to 15 years, unleashed by Deng Xiaoping's remark that it does not matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice, meaning that ideology must no longer stand in the way of China's economic growth. And it is a good thing that many in China's development zones have been lifted out of the functional poverty they lived in just 20 or so years ago when this true Great Leap Forward started in earnest. In those days it took many saved-up ration coupons and half a year's salary to buy one of those sit-up-and-beg Flying Pigeon bicycles on which the underfed Chinese used to ride, in surreal slow motion, in their tens of thousands, down the wide roads of their cities, along which a bus or truck might occasionally pass (with the engine off, coasting, to save fuel).

There is nothing wrong with China becoming the world's economic superpower in the next 50 years; this will assuredly happen. But it does matter if this happens without a significant change in its political arrangements. Economic liberalisation has happened without liberalisation in much else, and this joint fact - surprising to China-watchers who once predicted that the one would lead to the other as surely dawn leads to day - is ominous, because it is consistent with the thesis that a Chinese colleague and I advanced in our jointly written (and pseudonymous - to protect his identity) book written 12 years ago, The Long March to the Fourth of June, which is that the leadership of the Communist party of China desires not just economic but military hegemony, and it does so because it wishes to revive the glory days of China's brilliant past - the Han or Tang or early Qing dynasty glories, when China was in every sense truly Zhong Guo, the central kingdom of the earth.

Fanciful? Well: look at the rapid and dazzling development of China's military. Its once vast but useless - because poorly equipped and practically untrained - army has been slimmed but potentiated into one of the world's leading forces. China is a nuclear weapons power, and a major manufacturer and exporter of arms. It is determined not to allow a repetition of its humiliation at the hands of the North Vietnamese in the 1970s, and it is equally determined to have the military muscle to force reintegration of Taiwan, to gain control of the East and South China Seas - the latter as far as and including the Spratly Islands - to control the gas reserves that lie under each. For China is the world's second fuel-hungriest nation, and speeding towards becoming the hungriest; it is in no mood to allow its supplies to be compromised. It has built deep-water harbours in Pakistan and Bangladesh - with its own labour, note, for security reasons - to maintain oil supplies from the Middle East, and it will defend them if necessary; and so for its African oil-producing client states.

As it jets rapidly towards its objectives China likes to keep the rest of the world looking in another direction. It likes the Iraq situation for this reason. It funds delinquent regimes - Zimbabwe is one egregious example - partly to extend its foothold in neglected but future-useful parts of the world (it is a big player in Africa already) and partly to keep the west off-balance with lots of little local fires in problematic regions. Meanwhile, at home the huge interior where poverty still reigns, where farmers still plough with oxen as they did two thousand years ago, there are disturbances, riots, minor rebellions, attacks on police stations, almost every week. The restive, secretive country hides and controls its difficulties, its immense army of deracinated migrant labour, its problems and insecurities, behind a veil of propaganda, censorship, and harsh policing.

The speed of industrial development has created environmental damage to China that will take hundreds of billions of dollars and many, many decades to clean up. China is in a pollution crisis, but that is another secret rarely discussed. People die in mining and industrial accidents every day; the pace of development is too quick for health and safety regulations. Another secret that is not so secret is the fact that many western companies in joint ventures with Chinese companies find life hard-going, because of cheating and corruption, because the dice are loaded against them and the goalposts shifted whenever it suits the Chinese. And the "vast potential market" of China is a reality still to materialise, since almost all of its 1.3 billion people are in no position to buy the kinds of goods or services that western countries provide. The western companies operating in China are there to profit (literally) from the cheap labour and services for export back to the west. This is why China owns most of the US debt - in the trillions - and could if it wished switch off the world economy's lights by calling it in. And by the way, as the Tiananmen Square massacre shows, they are not above cutting off their own noses in certain circumstances, should they think they will save the rest of their face by doing so: as presently constituted they are not a good country to be holding anyone's debt.

Worst is the human rights record in China, and the fact that the west does nothing about it, those dollar bills dangling in front of its glazed eyes. There are 62 capital offences in China, including embezzlement and interpretations of extra-marital sex deemed by the authorities to count as rape. China executes more people in a year than the rest of the world put together. Corneas and kidneys from the executed are said to be used in transplants, and the families of the executed pay for the bullets used.

There are millions of prisoners in "administrative detention" (that is, without trial) in the vast gulag of forced labour camps in China's Qinghai province and elsewhere. Almost everyone reading these words will touch something made in a prison camp in China every week: plastic chopsticks, paper bags, simple things usually. As all the great economies of the world started out by doing, China's economy depends on slave labour to give it part of its boost; that is why some of its exports - the widgety, plastic things - are so cheap. Yet still China was given WTO membership and is treated as a respectable member of the world community.

China maintains a savagely brutal occupation of Tibet, and an oppressive occupation of Xinjiang and Mongolia. Arguably its south-western provinces, home of its "minority peoples", are occupied lands too. Its irredentism means that it will not rest until it has Taiwan back under Beijing's control; its sabre-rattling, threats and bullying towards Taiwan are a constant.

Recently I was asked to give a short course at a university in Shanghai. Then the invitation was withdrawn by the administrators of the course, because they feared that critical things I had written about China would reflect badly on themselves in the eyes of the authorities. Thus does self-censorship and self-monitoring do the work of repressive regimes for them. Interestingly, the course was in business ethics; had it been in philosophy or the history of ideas it would probably not have been a problem. But business exists under the floodlights there. (And it sure needs some ethics.)

China has a brilliant cultural past (more than half obliterated by the current regime's mad rush to make everywhere look like Manhattan as a signature of modernity), and wonderful people. Look at the Chinese outside the People's Republic for an indication of what they are like when left alone to be themselves. But while in China itself they are politically squashed under the incubus of a party that dreams of being the US of the future - and without US-style democratic checks and elections and changes of presidency as an at least partial restraint - the future for the rest of us is not so rosy. At very least the world community ought to demand that China observe standards and norms on human rights, political participation, labour practices and environmental protection, as the price of membership among responsible nations. Then we need not be so fearful that even more of a bully is going to take over from the US before the end of this century as the dominating player in world affairs.