The latest Pew poll that sees 44% of Americans believing China is the predominant world economic power puts me in mind of similar American sentiments back in 1989, when many Americans believed Japan was buying up America. Remember when Japanese investors bought Rockefeller Center for US$2 billion? The following year, of course, Japan’s bubble economy burst and the Japanese economy was in the doldrums for nearly fifteen years afterward.

Makes one wonder if Main Street may be an accurate – albeit contrarian – barometer for national over-reach, in the same vein as the buy/sell cycle on Wall Street: the average guy buying when he should be selling, and selling when he should be buying. As James Fallows so graphically points out in his blog entry about the poll, China has a long ways to go before it can afford to live life as Americans do. Americans, though, perceive China as already having the world economy in its rice bowl.

Of course, those that live in China know American perceptions as expressed in the poll are overblown. Unfortunately, State-side, CEOs, their VPs and the Boards of Directors don’t much look past polls (and that includes our own President of the United States), and will overreact to the peception that the balance of power is now China’s. Business decision makers will err  either on the side of pandering to Chinese business interests who are only too happy to perpetrate the illusion; or they’ll fortify the walls of Bunker America and push for protectionist measures from Congress.

Either way, politicians, economists and even journalists back in the States are clearly not providing the public a clear view of what’s happening in the world. That means there are a lot of opportunities America will simply not see through the myopia of its own polls.

Further reading: The Atlantic.com, People’s Press, Shanghaiist