Actually, the PIGS countries are Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Slovakia is doing realtively okay, and they're not a large enough component of the European market to drag down the Euro all that much.
Ireland sometimes gets discussed as well, and the latest iteration includes Great Britain as well (PIIGGS). Hence why Cameron and the Tories cut spending as they did. Speaking of which--I have to say, I'm actually impressed that they cut 10% out of defense. That's a ballsy move for a conservative party. Doubly so since they're hoping to achieve some of that budget savings by going halfsies with the French in a new
Anglo-French defense agreement.
Cutting defense and allying with the French?? These are not your father's Tories.
Sorry, enough derail. As to China...*shrug* people in the US complain when China does anything now. We're King of the Hill, and part of being King of the Hill is knowing that everyone else is going to try to take you down a few notches. We had a period of national hand-wringing about being eclipsed by Japan back in the 1980's, and prepared to welcome our new yellow masters and their robotic death engines. Until their economy hit a brick wall of their own making.
This is the same thing, different countries (can't forget India, even if they are dysfunctional as hell). Hell, maybe they'll do a remake of
Gung Ho and call it
Kung Pao.
To a certain extent, Americans got spoiled by the 1990s. We went from a multi-polar world pre-WWII to a bipolar world during the Cold War to a unipolar world after 1991, that was supposed to usher in Pax Americana. Instead we got fat and lazy and the Chinese finally reaped the fruits of limited economic liberalization.