Pick up an international paper published before Sept. 11, and China is either on the front page or generously featured inside. Not anymore. The rising giant of East Asia was swept from the media's mind last year faster than you could say "Osama bin Laden," and has been upstaged by the terror wars, which provide more urgent and exciting reading than, say, global centers of economic might shifting at glacial speed. This means a major architect of tomorrow's world -- China -- rises in the shadows, out of sight, and, as the saying goes, out of mind.
Beijing, then, must be beaming. With the exception of business-page gushing about the promise of 1 1/4 billion consumers, China, especially in the United States, had mostly been getting bad press: child labor, unexplained explosions, the suppression of Falun Gong, the Taiwan Straits tension, and so on.
"China's Century" is an attempt to offset such media negativity and skepticism within the business community, and call for more constructive cooperation -- that is, investment -- between China, Europe and the U.S. It is a compilation of pieces by Chinese ministers, Western ambassadors to Beijing, and the heads of multinationals in China such as Siemens and Goldman Sachs.