FRIENDS cheer as Li Weilan launches herself down the ski slope. She successfully skirts a lift mast, only to crash straight into her instructor.

Skiers riding on the lift overhead laugh and shout marks out of a hundred.

"I've never done this before," Ms Li said as she struggled back on to her Salomon skis.

"But I'll try anything."

This is no Alpine resort.

It is Nanshan Mountain, near the Great Wall of China on the outskirts of Beijing.

Up to 10,000 urban Chinese pay £50 (€74) a day here for ski passes, equipment rental and food.

Their VWs and Audis fill the resort's car park, which is ringed by billboards advertising Samsung mobile phones.

And Nanshan is merely one of a dozen ski resorts that have opened in recent years around the Chinese capital, despite a dearth of natural snow.

Coincidentally, Ms Li was born 25 years ago, just as the Communist Party was approving the economic reform programme that has sparked China's breathtaking rise as a global economic power.

That rise has created an army of Chinese middle-class consumers like Ms Li. But it has also created a new political imperative for the Communist Party - to sustain that economic growth at all costs.

There are now two Chinas: the affluent urban China of the eastern seaboard and the impoverished rural hinterlands.

The trick for Beijing is to keep enough benefits trickling down from the first to the second to keep the country's still giant peasant population happy.

That new political imperative is, in turn, driving China's trade and foreign policy in ways unimaginable even a decade ago.

Stability and international co-operation, not confrontation, are now the watchwords, and its relations with America have in particular been transformed.

Angus Maddison, the distinguished economic historian, predicts that China could become the world's largest economy by 2015, thus regaining the position it held for most of human history until the 19th century.

China makes twice as much steel as the US, a quarter of the world's entire production, and more laptops than any other nation.

Oil imports grew by 31pc last year to fuel the world's fastest growing economy.

Beijing will spend pounds stg£60bn (€110bn) on the 2008 Olympic Games, more than any previous host.

The economy has doubled in size every six years since China embarked on economic reform two decades ago.

With rising industrial production, urban incomes have grown 15pc a year, creating vast new legions of consumers.

This trade and consumer boom has put China in an enviable financial position.

It received more foreign direct investment last year - $50bn (€74bn) than any other country.

Beijing is planning to invest a greater share of those reserves in the euro and sterling, a move that would have a far-reaching impact on financial markets.

It presently invests half of its dollar holdings in US government bonds, buying up to 20pc of new issues over the past few months.

Without that investment, President Bush's deficit would be harder and much more expensive to sustain.

Both sides know this and their new mutual dependency has helped to create a new understanding between the two old adversaries.

Gone are the intense arguments about human rights, and whether Beijing should get "most favoured nation", trading status, which raged when President Bush's father occupied the White House.

Beijing is explicitly supporting America's anti-terror and anti-proliferation agenda.

Washington has chided Taiwan, which remains a potential source of conflict, for holding an anti-iBeijing referendum.

But the new amity has not entirely curbed competition between the present sole superpower and its most likely future rival.

After China became only the third nation to send a man into space last autumn, Mr Bush quickly vowed to send a man to Mars.

More serious is the new "Great Game" developing in Central Asia, where China and America are both vying for the Caspian oil they desperately covet to avoid dependency on the Middle East.

"The best comparison for what's happening is probably 19th-century America, rather than an East Asian nation like Japan or South Korea that recently underwent a similar development," said Arthur Kroeber, managing editor of the China Economic Quarterly, said.

"Both are continental-size economies with immense manufacturing capacities and vast pools of labour.

"The role of early European emigrants to America is now being played by the 120 million migrant Chinese peasants that man sweatshops and construction sites around the clock.

They come from the still impoverished Chinese interior to industrial centres like Shanghai.

This mass migration has created vast new conurbations like the Pearl RiverDelta, home to 50 million people in a land area the size of Greater London.

Lacking a social safety net, migrants in the delta work for less than £60 (€110) a month and live like slaves.

Mr Kroeber said: "A century ago, America was the biggest recipient of global capital and outsiders complained that cheap US labour threatened Europe's industries."

Now it is China's turn.

To the US, China is both a threat and a saviour: a buyer of luxury imports as well as a low-cost competitor and a potential bully, yet a counterweight to America.

Moscow, a foe since the days of the Sino-Soviet split, has struck up a new partnership with Beijing based on this calculus.

As permanent members of the UN Security Council, their co-operation may one day constitute a rival power.

Hu Jintao, China's new President, confirmed this strategy by visiting Russia - not America - on his first foreign trip last year.

Furthermore, China is keen to use some of the billions it has earned from toys and laptops to buy Russian oil and weapons.

It is Beijing's economic muscle that underpins its clout on the world stage.

As far away as Rio de Janiero, the new trade engine is exerting its pull. China's massive appetite for raw materials such as leather and iron ore has sparked a mini boom in Brazil.

Most importantly, however, Beijing has finally begun to see itself as an emerging great power, not a victimised nation, and has transformed its policy-setting process to fit that new role.

Foreign Affairs, the respected American periodical, recently wrote: "When Mao was alive, China made foreign policy decisions the way the Corleone family in The Godfather did: that is, Mao made the final calls himself, with Zhou Enlai acting as his consigliere.

"Contrast that with China's recent charm offensive in Asia."

To allay fears that Beijing will try to subdue its neighbours, the mandarins floated a new label, tested in focus groups, for their foreign policy - heping jueqi (peaceful rise) - words that could never be found in Mao's Little Red Book.

- Oliver Hickey
in Beijing