A recent tour of Chinese universities took me to Changchun, the capital of the puppet Manchukuo state that Japan tried to set up in the 1930s in China's remote northeast region. Today it is a sprawling conurbation of more than 6 million people, broad highways and high-rise apartments and a key player in China's car industry, which is expanding at around 40 percent a year.

A modern university covers a campus that could embrace half a dozen of Japan's main universities. Unlike in Japan, its students operate in a system that rewards hard work and intelligence. Even in the bitter cold of a Manchurian winter, one could feel the dynamism of a nation on the move. And Changchun is only one of China's little-known boom towns.

Before leaving for China I had been invited to a conference on China organized by some of Japan's alleged opinion leaders. Most were in severe denial. Some wanted to insist that China's growth figures were faked, as if those well-dressed crowds, floods of cars and endless apartment blocks meant nothing. Others claimed that progress is confined to the coast, as if Changchun and many other booming inland centers did not exist. In any case, they said, China has only one quarter of Japan's GNP, ignoring studies showing that in terms of purchasing power China may already have overtaken Japan.