China has altered not just the global economy, but economics itself

China's transition is working. Such confidence that Beijing has again averted a hard landing is increasingly easy to declare with gutso: the confirmation will be in the remainder of 2016, as the private sector follows the public sector's lead in ramping up investment.

Sure, the global economy may be stagnant, but thanks largely to China, it's also become more stable than ever. Amidst all the concerns about deflation, debt, and growth collapse, a far more momentous structural shift is being missed by Western market fundamentalists: China has effectively put a cap or ceiling on prices of virtually every industrial commodity and manufactured good. This is huge: it's effectively a permanent bulwark against out-of-control inflation on a wide global scale. It's as if the problem of world hunger has been solved by vast and cheap new food production capacity.

Years and decades from now, this will likely be remembered as China's and the increasingly China-driven global economy's finest hour: for the first time in the modern epoch, the economic balance has tilted to a parity between East and West which has deeply stabilized the entire body of human commercial activity - in the process utterly confounding traditional Western notions and assumptions of standard "boom-bust" business cycles.

Before China came along and crashed worldwide prices for everything from clothing to shipping, downturns were far harder to prevent from spiraling into outright contractions. That's because Western firms simply can't operate with the same tolerance for extended losses as their Chinese counterparts. Price wars translated far more quickly - and sometimes ruthlessly - into capacity and job cuts that in turn ratchet into a wider systemic seizure of credit and liquidity for businesses and consumers.

Since the 2008-09 financial crisis, however, China has fervently captured ever greater market share across the entire gamut of sectors and industries in the global economy to such an extent that even in downturns, gluts have become a bigger problem than shortages. Conventional Western wisdom sees nothing short of calamity in this change - i.e. the self-correcting nature of "efficient" and "free" markets has been usurped by insidious scheming central bankers and other global central planners. The more sanguine view, however - available only to minds that break out of the market fundamentalist box - is that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has cushioned the blow to investors and consumers alike that would otherwise have been more severe if it also operated according to Western principles.

In fact, given the precipitous slowdown in China's private secondary industrial sector since 2014, one can argue that its SOEs - so widely reviled for their inefficiency and credit drain - have literally held up asset values and goods prices worldwide for over two years. Only because so many of them could still churn out goods and products even as they slid further into loss territory has overall growth - both within China and internationally - not fallen off a cliff. That's because they still paid their workers' wages and pensions, without which the wider consumer economy would've taken a hit, negatively impacting the dynamic private sector, as well. In a real sense, Chinese SOEs have been a shadow force for global stability - a contribution to the global economy that probably won't be recognized in the West for years.

That's not to say SOE reform isn't badly and urgently needed: far from it. But it's to say that Keynesian pump-priming - some would argue on steroids, in China's case - has served an important purpose that's easy to overlook because it's so ideologically despised in the distorted neoliberal orthodoxy of the post-cold war era.

It means that China has altered not just the global economy, but economics itself: both Keynes and Friedman now have a permanent place in the pantheon of macroeconomic theory and practice, with neither able to exclude the other. Indeed, that's how Friedman himself always viewed Keynes, contrary to so many of his most partisan devotees: he never saw supply-side theory as supplanting the famous Oxford sage from the Depression and world war era, but mainly supplementing it.

With China now, the yin-and-yang of Keynes and Friedman seems intriguingly suggestive of a broader yin-and-yang of capitalism and socialism themselves; as with any yin-yang pair, each member's excesses and deficiencies point to the other's equities and strengths. History is the only reliable witness and proof of such primeval realities, and at this pivotal moment of global crisis, it inexorably points to the eventual realization of not a Chinese century, nor a second American century, but indeed a Chimerican century.