Asia’s current share of global GDP (about 38%) is still far from what it was in 1820, but both countries feel that they can – and must – participate in calling the global shots. It took China’s government a protracted sixteen years to negotiate its re-entry into the GATT/WTO, but it soon showed its mettle by assuming joint leadership (along with Brazil, India, and South Africa) of the G-20, a group of primarily dynamic developing countries that threw down the gauntlet to the industrialized powers at the Cancún WTO ministerial meeting in September 2003.