The colourful lanterns during the trial illumination of the 2010 Shanghai Yuyuan Garden New Spring Folklore Artistic Lanterns Fair, in downtown Shanghai, China, Feb 07, 2010. Photo: Xinhua Photo

The Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. It is sometimes termed the Lunar New Year and on Sunday, the Year of the Tiger will be ushered in with red, the colour of happiness, in abundance,

According to the Chinese zodiac, tiger years come with drama, intensity, change, travel, new inventions, exciting opportunities and also the possibility of disasters and world conflicts. The drama may be less intensive than suggested by the zodiac but there is no doubt that we are witnessing the emergence of a more assertive China to match its role in leading the world from recession while there is the danger that the perception of a weakened West, set to spend coming years limping from the debris of the Great Recession, may result in overreach.

If the renminbi is still pegged to the US dollar into 2011 and US jobs growth is only at an average of 95,000 per month as the White House forecast on Thursday, for 2010, Obama will be under pressure to impose a special tariff on Chinese goods, heading towards an election year. Besides, he would look foolish opposing a measure that Congress itself could enact.

Some 55% of China’s population is rural and 73% of India’s; the typical manufacturing monthly wage is $120 in China.

Over the decade, there will be a huge threat to the manufacturing base in the West - - better paying jobs than flipping burgers. For example, China is the world’s biggest steel producer and its steel industry accounts for nearly half of global output. In fact, its output is so large that it matches the combined output of the next four biggest steel makers, namely: Japan, the United States, Russia and India.

SEE Finfacts articles:

Industrial overcapacity in China is “wreaking far-reaching damage on the global economy"

And in the Developing World, the undervalued renminbi is also creating havoc:

China says currency exchange rate close to “reasonable” level

Besides, being the world's most populous country, it's no surprise that China has a big diaspora and the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are termed as the people from Nanyang - -  the South Sea. The Chinese use practical  location names e.g. Beijing is North City; Nanjing is South City; Tokyo is called East City and the Japanese word for East Sea is Tokai.

Most Chinese can speak Mandarin and their regional dialect. The people of China's industrial heartland, the Pearl River delta province of Guangdong, north of Hong Kong, speak Cantonese as Hongkies do. Napoleon Bonaparte had a role to play in the predominance of Hokkien, the dialect of the southern region of Fujian province (north of Guangdong) in two separate islands in Southeast Asia: Penang, northwest of Peninsular Malaysia (south of Thailand) and Singapore, off the southern tip of Malaysia.

Napoleon made his brother King of Holland in 1806 and in London, the exiled Prince of Orange had entrusted protection to the British for the Dutch colony, the East Indies (modern Indonesia) and the fortified trading post of Malacca on the coast of south Malaysia. However, Robert Townsend Farquhar, the British Governor of Penang, ordered the destruction of the Dutch fort in Malacca as he saw it as a trading rival for Penang. Chinese Hokkien settlers were urged to move to Penang.

Some years later, Stamford Raffles of the East India Company, selected the island of Temasek (Sea Town in Javanese, now known as Singapore, the Lion City) as a better location for a trading post than Penang and Raffles used a succession dispute embroiling the Sultanate of Johor to get the necessary local agreement. Meantime, the part of the Hokkien population, who had not moved north to Penang, crossed the Straits to the island, as did the Japanese in early 1942 to receive the greatest surrender of British forces in history from General Arthur Percival, who had commanded the Essx Regiment in Bandon, my hometown, in 1919.

 So after that detour:

Gōng xǐ fā cái ! - - the traditional Chinese New Year's greeting means may prosperity be with you.