Potentially, this could give Pakistan a chance to break out of its often defensive prickliness.
Britain, hoping to reduce China's prickliness on the issue, announced in October that year that it was abandoning its century-old policy (unique among Western countries) of merely recognising China's "suzerainty" over the region rather than its sovereignty.
Now, suddenly, it looks as if a free-trade area embracing nearly 680m European and Latin American consumers, and $11.6 trillion of GDP, could be signed by October.Yet the prickliness remains.
JOSEPH CONRAD'S real name Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski seems to express all the prickliness of his character and unassimilated knobbliness of his Polish background.
According to Mark Gevisser, his biographer, Mr Mbeki's extreme prickliness about racism makes him long to "redeem" Africa in the world's eyes.His hopes for doing so are pinned on the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Nepad, launched in 2002.
More western sensitivity to Arab concerns and a less blinkered Arab prickliness about the sacredness of sovereignty in countries with vicious regimes and about the nobility of "resistance" to any government that is friendly to the United States.
But it was quickly back to prickliness as usual.There was no disguising the blast, which brought destruction over a 4km (2.5-mile) radius.
But the Daily Telegraph should have known better that to write"During the war, Ida Grinspan, now 79, was deported to the Polish death camp in 1944 but was one of the few survivors to make it back to France"The Labour-supporting Mirror deserves its share of blushes too, for this"Seeing is believing and the Polish camp is pure evil"Many may dismiss the complaint as typical Polish prickliness.
A pampered Westerner cocooned in a comfortable hotel may prattle about progress but it shows how little he knows about the real Poland.Such prickliness remains, but it is diminishing.
But his reaction also illustrates the prickliness of Chinese leaders when foreigners presume to pronounce on the eternal verities of Chinese culture.If even the venerable Mr Kissinger can be caught out, what hope for American statesmen far less familiar with China?
In foreign-policy terms, he may be right: the successor chosen by Mr Putin is likely to offer the same combination of prickliness and occasional pragmatism.
