Climate change at the end of last year followed by heavy weather in the New Year seems apt for China in terms of where it stands in the world today.

At Copenhagen in December, Beijing heaved a sigh of relief at what it felt was a fitting finale to 2009, which began with anxiety and apprehensions over 'critical' anniversaries in the calendar. Given the formidable challenges it had to contend with, in its own eyes China acquitted itself creditably both at home and abroad.

If the G20 summit in April underscored the reality of G2, of Chimerica being no chimera but the centrepiece of an emerging order, the climate change conference affirmed that the climate of global power equations had changed with China's arrival on the world stage.

On the strength of its unrivalled foreign exchange reserves, China "capitalised" upon the global economic crisis as an opportunity. After the G20 summit, there was no whisper of a "China threat". Far from that, China was assiduously wooed. The big powers were convinced that, as the first Jimmy Choo Handbags one to break out of crisis, the political, military and diplomatic heft of the "world's factory" need to be dealt with in inventive ways.

In contrast to 2008, when the Tibet "issue" threatened to (but did not) cast a shadow over the Beijing Olympics, there was no incident in 2009 on the 50th anniversary of the March 10 revolt when the Dalai Lama fled to India. Similarly, there was no attempt to observe publicly the 20th anniversary of the suppression, on June 4, 1989, of the protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere; or, the 10th anniversary, on July 22, of the ban on Falun Gong.

While these dates were incident-free, the authorities were shaken by the July 5 riots in Xinjiang's Urumqi, which claimed nearly 200 lives. As a result, in the run-up to the Republic's 60th anniversary celebrations on October 1, security measures were tightened on a massive scale to signal that not the least disturbance would be countenanced.

The National Day show of military muscle was intended as much for restive elements at home as for overseas entities, especially the US and Taiwan. Today's China is stable, strong, and prosperous. Yet the security lockdown for October 1 was unprecedented - to stress that the leadership will not allow its grip to be tested or image to be tainted.

November brought Barack Obama, who had declined to meet the Dalai Lama before his visit and gave a wide berth to ticklish issues. By then, the Chinese were the biggest car buyers. In contrast to the US touching a four-decade low of 10.3 million in 2009, China's auto sales hit a high of 12.75 million.

After the warm glow of a record auto boom, the $586-billion stimulus, upbeat growth and leading a critical mass of developing and small nations at Copenhagen, 2010 began with the worst cold snap in 40 years.

The New Year saw China heavily snowed under. China-US relations took a dive and Australia scrapped a natural gas pact. Beijing was flayed for executing a British drug smuggler, jailing a dissident and blocking the US bid for sanctions against Iran. It was panned, again, for the "failure" Immersion Watch of the Copenhagen summit. And, in a new twist, the economic meltdown was blamed on China's rise on the world stage, which had made it "arrogant", "mercantilist" and unmindful of its responsibilities as a major power.

There was more bad news: Washington announced the sale of air-defence missiles to Taiwan, scheduled Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama and held out the prosp
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