They use a political yardstick to measure this map. Tawang paid a tribute to the Chinese emperors, so ipso facto it is part of China. By this logic, Afghanistan should be included in the map of India, since the province paid tribute to the Mughal emperors for hundreds of years, at about the same time that Tawang was purchasing peace with the Ming dynasty. The People's Republic of China loses its republican sheen when it comes to territory, and turns imperial even if it cannot always get imperious. This distinction between China and the People's Republic of China tends to escape general observation, but it glittered in the intellectual landscape of Brajesh Mishra, national security adviser and principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who led the negotiations that resulted in the first joint declaration between India and China in Beijing this week as well as the memorandum of understanding by which China informally recognised Sikkim as part of India. We only reiterated our assurance, first given in 1954 and repeated by Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, that we accepted Tibet as part of the People's Republic of China. We did not say that Tibet was part of China. This may seem semantic, but the Dalai Lama has always argued that Tibet was never part of China and therefore cannot be claimed by the successor state of People's Republic of China.

However, there were enough Tibetan princes through as many centuries as you can count on one hand who came to Beijing bearing gifts as their tribute to the overlord. In fact, they came so often that the Chinese got a little tired of such frequent displays of loyalty. There had to be a reason, and there was. The custom was that anyone who brought a gift to the imperial court would get a royal present in return. The imperial gift was always much more valuable than the yak-skin or whatever the Tibetan princes delivered to His Supreme Majesty. So each time a Tibetan princeling felt in need of some decent silk, he picked up a patch of goatskin and turned up at the palace. The mandarins caught on. The palace passed an order restricting the fealty of the Tibetans. Attitudes have not altered that much, which is why Beijing is puzzled at the new Tibetan intransigence. All that the Tibetans have to do is to sing the national anthem and they are gifted a road, or an apartment building as reward.

The Chinese, I am pleased to report, are human. They can quadruple their Gross Domestic Product in 17 years, they can stuff the malls of America with their mass-produced goods, and they can build the Three Gorges Dam, but they still cannot manage the traffic. Health warning: Do not cross the street in China on a green light. Read again to get this instruction right. Wait for the light to become red, and then cross. Why? Let me explain.

You stand at a kerb, patiently, obediently waiting for permission from the lights to cross. Eventually green comes up. At precisely that very moment, every driver in the vicinity, including some at right angles to you, steps on his accelerator and turns his vehicle in your direction. It is not a matter of a straggler bus or a speeding car beating the turning lights. Traffic in China is completely indifferent to traffic management. But why cross the street on a red light then? Because when the lights are red you are at least careful, you know what you are getting into, hesitation comes naturally to your tense mind and you can take suitable physical precautions. Green makes you careless, with attendant consequences.

Size matters. This is a nation in love with both the prefix and the suffix. It must be at least Great if not the Greatest. There is nothing new about this. Confucius, in the sixth century before Christ, was certain that China constituted the entire world, and the various epithets he gave for his country included "The Middle Kingdom", "The Multitude of Great States" or, more prosaically, "All Under Heaven". He would not deign to include the barbarians that lay beyond this Multitude in the civilised world. And if foreigners were not barbarians they were fantasists. Even trade with such outsiders was unworthy of a Chinese. "The mind of the superior man dwells on righteousness; the mind of a little man dwells on profit," he believed. That may be true, but don't tell that to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party in its present incarnation. But the Han adopted Confucianism with great enthusiasm, and considered their emperor the link between man and heaven. Notions of superiority are too deep to be affected by the egalitarian philosophy of Communism. What the communists have done of course is to declare that everyone is great by the simple virtue of being Chinese. Thus you can go from the Great Wall of China to the Great Hall of the People by making a Great Leap Forward.

Only a fool would consider the Great Wall hewn through thousands of miles of mountain unimpressive. But the most remarkable fact about it is not the effort in stone, but its proximity to Beijing. It is only an hour by highway from the city. It is as if the defence of China were synonymous with the defence of its capital city. The actual borders of China, even if you forget the claimed ones, lie thousands of miles beyond the wall. Conquerors and marauders, in other words, had licence to do what they wanted to the people beyond the wall; all that the ruling class wanted to ensure was its own protection and safety.

But the Chinese were not the only power to make a virtue of such a conceit. Why did the defence of India begin at Panipat, which is about as far from Delhi as the Great Wall is from Beijing? Which brings us to another question. Has a wall ever saved a capital? The wall did not save Beijing when it mattered. Only an army can save a nation, not stone or barbed wire. A wall provides only a notional sense of confidence, and may be counterproductive, for it can protect that invader as easily as it separates him from the defender. The Chinese gave the invader more depth through the Great Wall than they kept for themselves. The only really successful military wall was the one that guarded the Byzantine city of Constantinople, which turned into the Islamic city of Istanbul. But that is because it was a double wall. The first wall was the sea. There was simply no space between the sea and the city wall for an invading army to rest and mobilise.

The Great Leap Forward in modern Shanghai is a flyover that literally takes a 15-kilometre leap from one end of the city to the other through a trajectory across a multi-storeyed sky. When I last visited Shanghai, in 1988, it looked like a cleaner version of Calcutta. Fifteen years later, only Calcutta looks like a cleaner version of Calcutta. Shanghai has become a Manhattan that begins in New York and ends in Washington. That, trust me, is not too wayward an exaggeration. Shanghai's boom starts from the sea and echoes for hundreds of miles along the Yangtze. Historically Shanghai has been a collection of the world's cities: a British quarter here, a French quarter there. It is now an American quarter everywhere. A Chinese friend remarked a little regretfully that modern China did not have any faith. A few days after that lunch I disagreed. Not only do the Chinese have faith, they have become fundamentalists. They are fundamentalist achievers. All the passion that we reserve for the Babri mosque or a Ram temple, the Chinese conserve for highrise apartments, highways, infrastructure, consumer goods and massive projects. We can sneer at the corruption in new China, but does it really suit a pot to call the kettle black?

The legacy of the first generation of modern China's leaders, Mao Zedong and Chou Enlai, was a disconnect between ambition and ability. They mixed high ambition with low achievement, but they did create a modern mind out of opium-eaters. Deng Ziaoping, master of the second generation, was a cat with a dream. He preserved a Communist party with the lure of collective wealth sponsored by state capital. You may count as many contradictions in that as you want, but it worked. Deng's message was: keep your head low, your eyes open and chase the boom. Prosperity has been uneven; it always is. Half of China is a parasite on the other half. The nouveau riche have become very riche indeed because the lowest end of pay in a slave factory is sometimes as low as a hundred dollars annually. But growth keeps the peace. And thereby hangs another economic tale. The Chinese sell the highest priced brands to those who can afford and illusion to the others. You cannot tell the difference.

You can take Shanghai out of the east, but can you take the east out of Shanghai? 'Hello DVD hello DVD hello DVD bag bag bag shirt shirt shirt cheap cheap cheap...' The ten-yuan market of fakes jostles competitively beside the legitimate shops. You can sip coffee and window-shop at Dunhill before taking ten steps into another world. In this bazaar, catfights screech through crowded alleys as saleswomen scratch and scramble to pull customers into their shanty shops. There are any number of theories about the Great Fakes of China, but nothing I hear from politicians, bureaucrats or economists is co-terminus with logic. My explanation is that the Chinese deliberately promote the Great Fakes in order to include the poor into the stratosphere of the brand-world at prices within their reach. That still does not explain how you can sell what looks exactly like a Mont Blanc pen for two dollars, even if not a single part of the fake pen has anything to do with the 200-dollar reality in any boutique. The miracle is that you cannot tell the difference, and the bloody pen writes pretty well too. The nib is made of metal and the point polished to smooth virtue. That goddam Mont Blanc crest, looking so utterly genuine, alone must cost more than a dollar. How did they assemble the whole thing for a dollar, which is what it must cost if you decide to sell it for two. The silk in the Versace tie is silken enough, the knot is neat: what more could you ask for from a necktie? Why pay a hundred dollars for a Hugo Boss shirt when you can get one for two and a half?

This is Fake Orgasm Economy. But, as any psychologist will tell you, fake orgasms have done more to preserve social harmony than genuine ones. That is the Great Chinese Secret.

If you see anyone in the next few days who has become nonchalantly generous, and insists on giving you a dream gift, he has probably been visiting China on the Prime Minister's aircraft. As for me, I am now deeply embarrassed by the genuine Mont Blanc in my pocket.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.