It was a small but telling insight into who's up and who's down in Asia: a big conference in Tokyo this week on prospects for German business in the region ran three workshops about China and one about Japan.
While organisers duly noted that Japan remains by far the biggest economy in the region and a potentially lucrative market, Germany's own trade figures tell the tale: its exports to China this year are set to surpass those to Japan, which are falling.
"Japan's structures are breaking up and that is throwing up new opportunities," said Werner Pascha, a professor of East Asian economics at Duisburg University.
Perhaps, responded Juergen Heraeus, who runs his own company and headed the conference's China working group. "But China has already broken up (its old economic structures) and is advancing rapidly and powerfully."
German business, in short, is scrambling like policymakers and chief executives throughout Asia to rise to the challenges posed by a rampant China that, on all evidence, will stick to the market socialism that has delivered 20 years of rapid growth when a new generation of leaders takes over in the autumn.
"Everything we know about the new leaders is that they will stick to the reform course," said Joachim Broudre-Groeger, Germany's ambassador in Beijing.
So how should China's neighbours respond? Takashi Nishioka, president of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, said Japan had to adapt to its customers, develop new technologies and increase the quality of its human capital.
The answer cannot be faulted. The problem for Japan and Asia's Tiger economies is that China, which already turns out more engineers every year than the United States, is not standing still.
Another German statistic is illustrative: some 12,000 Chinese students are studying in Germany compared with 2,000 from Japan, noted Uwe Thomas, state secretary for education and research.
"In China we're seeing created an industrial manufacturing superpower with an unbeatable cost structure, an endless pool of cheap labour and the capacity to implant so much information into capital equipment that with a hungry and disciplined workforce you could see explosive increases in productivity," said Kenneth Courtis, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs in Asia.
Morgan Stanley economist Andy Xie said China was inflicting the same competitiveness shock on the Tigers as they inflicted on Japan 10 years ago. The difference is one of speed and magnitude.
Japan's model, copied by the Tiger economies, was mainly about accumulating manufacturing expertise over time while retaining ownership of the means of production, Xie argued in a note to clients. But China is taking quiet a different tack.
"China is compromising on ownership in exchange for a rapid inflow of foreign capital and know-how. It is thus skipping the learning curve and importing every expertise it may not have."
Thus Japanese electronics firms are already making top-of-the-range goods in China.
Volkswagen says its factories there rank for quality among its top five in the world. China even exported its first cars recently to the United States.
No country is more acutely aware of the China challenge than Singapore, which took another step toward re-engineering its economy this week by announcing that its investment arm, Temasek Holdings, would shed stakes in companies in its vast portfolio that can no longer compete internationally.
Accepting that it will lose lower-end electronics business to China and cheaper neighbours, Singapore has been promoting promising new technologies such as life sciences.
But Xie said the drawback to the new-technology option is that the Tiger economies are squeezed between the lifestyle and intellectual freedom offered by the United States and the scale and low barriers to entry offered by China.
"It is difficult to see what the Tiger economies could offer to attract the best and the brightest," Hong Kong-based Xie said.
In biosciences, for example, it is China, not the Tiger economies, that have established leadership.
Overall, Xie said the ideas to date for transforming the Tiger economies have not been very good. "The conceptual understanding of the situation is patchy," he said.
None of this means that China is about to suck the life out of its neighbours overnight. As its domestic demand grows, China's imports from the rest of Asia, which totalled $85 billion last year, could soar by 55-85 percent in the next four years, said Cliff Tan of Salomon Smith Barney in Singapore.
"Combined, China plus Hong Kong as a destination for Asian exports is already more important than Japan and nearly as important as the United States," Tan said in a report.
Still, Courtis at Goldman Sachs said that as long as China maintained political stability, kept investing 35-40 percent of its GDP and attracting $40-45 billion of foreign direct investment a year, it is on course to become an extremely powerful global manufacturing centre within a decade.
"The reality is that China will become a full-set producer. They will basically be able to become players across a broad front of industries," he said.
It is the prospect of tapping into this growth that German business executives gathered in Tokyo found so alluring.
A survey of medium-sized German firms in China conducted by Joerg Wuttke, head of the German chamber of commerce in China, showed that 85 per cent of them plan to expand their business and 49 per cent said they were profitable within one to three years.
"The economic policy reforms are irreversible," said Volkswagen AG board member Robert Buechelhofer.
"The advantages of doing business in China can only increase."