The highest ranking delegation of Chinese officials to visit Taiwan arrived in Taipei on Monday. Chen Yunlin, Beijing's top negotiator on Taiwan affairs, is leading a 60-person delegation, in the first Taiwan-China negotiations ever on Taiwanese soil. No one more senior from China has come to Taiwan since the end of the civil war in 1949 (unless you count the Nationalist Party which fled the Communist takeover.)

These negotiations are hugely important and extremely symbolic. For China and Taiwan, they are tantamount to the US elections. While they are not going to usher in new governments, they could set in motion a new era of relations between China and Taiwan -- unless knuckleheads on Taiwan or China mess it up.

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There's been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how China could ride to the rescue of a global recession, using the latent power of 1.3 billion consumers to power global GDP. Who would have thought that we'd be calling on China to save our bacon? Witness a New York Times editorial on Oct. 26 with the remarkable headline: "As China Goes, So Goes...." What the Times called for, and what others have seconded, is for China to unleash domestic demand, ramp up imports, thereby keeping the global economy afloat.

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Is China really as stable as we've been led to believe? Recent events make it seem likely that Beijing is going to get kicked in the teeth by the worldwide financial crisis. And the strikes and protests now occurring throughout the country suggest that China's authoritarian political system is in for a real challenge.

For years we've heard the narrative in the United States that China was going to have a smooth ride to superpower status. A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace earlier this year predicted that China would overtake the US economy by 2035. A few weeks ago, the New York Times suggested in an editorial that China's economy might be the one engine that could drag the world out of its current rut. The LA Times, noting that China possesses a world-high $2 trillion in foreign exchange, predicted that at last weekend's economic summit, China would wield "a big stick."

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