China is set to return as a global power, and its domination of the Beijing Olympics is just another sign of its resurgence, according to New York Times writer, Nicholas D. Kristof.

The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas - meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi. But then China and India both began to fall apart at just the time that Europe began to rise. China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.