HONG KONG Explosive growth in economic and political power ensured that the past 10 years set the foundations for what many analysts predict will be the Asian Century as the world tilts firmly eastwards.

Many dangers lie ahead, but observers say the world's two most populous countries - China and India - appear on course to define the decades to come after the American Century and the British Century before that.

“Yes, absolutely, I think this decade demonstrates the real promise of Asia,” said Alan Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.

“The last two years in particular have seen a sea shift in real power and I think that's been highlighted by the travails the Americans and the Europeans have had after the global economic and financial crisis.

“It has really focused everybody on the fact that China has now arrived and India is not that far behind, and power really has shifted to the East and away from Europe and North America.” China had been “a rock of stability”, Dupont told AFP. Time magazine chose “The Chinese Worker” as a runner-up for its annual Person of the Year award in 2009.

Robert Broadfoot, managing director of the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, agreed that the past decade belonged to Asia.

“There is a shift of the assets and, with that, political power towards China in particular and Asia in general,” he said.

But if the tilt from West to East was sustained in the decades ahead, it would be more appropriate to call it the Chinese Century, not the Asian Century, Broadfoot said.

The statistics speak for themselves - blistering economic growth rates of more than 8.0 per cent in China - while Western countries slumped into recession. The United States now counts China as its biggest creditor nation.

But the economic figures - India also achieved growth rates of more than 7.0 per cent - are only part of Asia's rise.

The Chinese government has reportedly set up a 6.5-billion-dollar fund to expand the global footprint of state-controlled media companies like Xinhua, China Central Television and China Radio International.

Chinese scientists are becoming more prominent, with the nation's space programme leading the way. China was the world's third nation to put a man in space and has ambitions to send a man to the moon.

India has also enjoyed success in space with the announcement in September that its first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, had found evidence of large quantities of water on the moon's surface.—AFP