So President Obama made his first trip to China, a vastly different place than the medieval place my grandfather, Dr. T.W. Ayers, found when he went there as a medical missionary in 1901.

I wonder if the president spied as I did the amusing sign in English on the door of a men's room in the Great Hall of the People. It announced "GENTS" — a jaunty translation for such a correct society.

The sign was a touch of humanizing fallibility that contrasted with the stiff formality of the meeting in one of the building's great halls.

By the time Obama visited the Great Hall, surely that sign had been put right in a country that has astounded me each of the three times I've been there from the early '80s, to the mid-'90s, and, finally, in 2005.

That presidential trip and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington sets in motion some disturbing but in the end reassuring thoughts about the strengths and drawbacks of the three societies and their political systems.

But China has always been foremost in my mind.

China, since my earliest childhood, had always been a real place to me. Dad had lived there and would amuse the family — and hilariously break up newspaper conventions — by singing "Sweet Adeline" in Mandarin.

Grandfather had been a medical missionary there for 25 years and wore medals awarded by a Chinese president in his portrait on the living room wall. The medals were a source of awe and envy to a child.

Dinner table conversation about the Evil Dowager Empress, the gallant Christian Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his beautiful American-educated wife made the China of my childhood as close as Georgia.

Then came the long years of isolation, when the vast land was "lost" due to the treachery of communists infiltrating our State Department and allowing China to turn Red, according to the late, unlamented Sen. Joe McCarthy.

After all the histories had been written exposing Chiang as more fascist dictator than Christian democrat, President Nixon had gone to China and President Carter had brought the great reformer Deng Xiaoping to Atlanta, and a different China emerged.

I shook Deng's soft hand in Atlanta, and looking down at the tiny man in the Mao jacket, I wondered how such an insignificant-looking man could lift a continental nation and fling it from medieval times to the 21st century.

He did it by modernizing the country from the toes up. In the '90s, I was in the toe, the southern city of Shenzhen, revolving in a restaurant atop the tallest building in Asia at the time.

In 1979, the city had been a fishing village north of Hong Kong when Deng decided to make Shenzhen the lead city in the first of his Special Economic Zones.

By the time development reached Shanghai, skyscrapers and five-star hotels had grown out of rice paddies tied to other major cities by multi-lane highways. The whole world could see Deng's miracle in the Beijing Olympics.

Here's where the different systems in the United States, China and India come into play. China could deploy its capital where it wanted: economic development, health and education, because it is a one-party, authoritarian state.

Chinese development was stalled until Mao Zedong and his murderous, crazy theories were out of the way. India, too, lagged because of its long flirtation with socialist ideology and the religious-cultural notion that highways are for cows as well as cars.

China's development will continue to outpace both the United States and India because the latter are multi-party democracies. There are disagreements within China's National Peoples Congress, but nothing compared to the struggle in Congress to pass a health-care bill.

Growth-rate estimates for 2008 put China first with 9 percent, India at 7.4 percent and the United States at 1.1 percent. In 2009, the American economy barely nosed above zero, while Chinese stimulus measures kept it growing at a fast clip.

If we are witnessing the beginnings of a "Chinese Century," should we be worried that they are out to rule the world? Not if history, which defines the character of a people, is a reliable guide.

China hasn't invaded any country. It was the United States that spent billions upon billions to depose a single dictator in Iraq — capital the Chinese were spending on infrastructure, universities and technical and secondary schools.

Not since the year 1281 has China attempted an invasion, and that was a disaster. The Mongol emperor launched a great fleet against Japan that was sunk in a terrible typhoon the Japanese call "kamikaze" — the divine wind.

Fear of China, I think, is overblown. Frustration with our frequently stymied, uber-partisan system is a constant, but as Obama walked on the Great Wall, I bet he thought about the peasants buried in it.

China is built for speed, but Obama — despite the crazies who call him a socialist — and the rest of us prefer the free, frustrating democracies of India and America.