To many in the West, though fewer in Hong Kong and Asia, China's rise is moving roughly according to plan. The forces unleashed by Deng Xiaoping's reforms have created an increasingly free-market economy, albeit with some unwanted legacies, such as the tendency of Chinese companies to receive state support or steal intellectual property.
For most observers in Europe and America, though, the path is broadly established, even if those who understand China a little better think that nothing could be further from the truth.
One of the rather odd, even amusing, assumptions which follows is that China is also progressing, albeit gradually, towards a Western-style democratic system of governance, even although the government in Beijing has never declared that intention, and there seems little domestic interest in such a transition.
Most of the enthusiasm for this sort of reform seems to come from Chinese dissidents, or Western commentators.
These false assumptions have allowed another consequence of China's rise to be overlooked. Western beliefs that China will gradually adopt concepts of democracy and laissez-faire economics also assume that the country will embrace Western ways of thinking. They assume that China will accept Western social values, and Western ideas of morality, too.
Unfortunately for those sitting in Washington or Brussels, nothing could be further from the truth.