A few years ago, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to imagine European leaders, begging bowl in hand, turning to China for a financial bailout. Equally, few would have predicted that Chinese leaders visiting Washington would publicly berate US policymakers about their mismanagement of the world’s biggest economy. But the world has changed. The implosion in 2008 of the financial system in the US and Europe and last year’s European sovereign debt crisis have accelerated the shift of economic momentum to Asia.

In 2012, the US and Europe are likely to be flirting with recession for much of the time. Barring a hard landing in China, Asia-ex Japan should continue to clip along nicely at around 7 per cent, according to most economists.

The dramatic change in fortunes has spawned a degree of triumphalism among some Asians. “There’s no crisis of capitalism,” says Meghnad Desai, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics. “There’s a crisis of western capitalism, which has gone geriatric. The dynamic capitalism, with its energy, innovation and sheer greed for growth has moved east.”

Lord Desai is not alone in sensing some sort of moral comeuppance. Asian countries have been “stamped upon” by the west for centuries, he says, and until relatively recently berated as “basket cases” unable to feed themselves. Now, he says, it is the people of the south in general and Asia in particular who are managing the wealth-generating forces of capitalism better.

But that sense of triumph only goes so deep. For at least three interconnected reasons, the crisis of capitalism in the west is deeply unsettling for the east as well. First, apart from Japan, South Korea and a few other small states, such as Singapore, Asian countries are still mostly poor or middle income at best. Many had plotted a path towards future prosperity via the adoption of progressively more “capitalistic” policies – opening their economies to market forces by loosening the state’s hold over banks, interest rates and currency movements. But that path to prosperity now looks more perilous than before, prey to boom and bust and to financial catastrophe.

The Asian technocrats who had put their faith in a gradual shift to free-market capitalism, often in opposition to more interventionist or nationalist voices at home, are confused or disillusioned. Changyong Rhee, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, feels the sense of intellectual disarray. Much of the confusion, he says, stems from the fact that western governments have changed their tune so radically since Asia’s own financial crisis in 1997.

Then, the International Monetary Fund – stepmother of the laissez-faire Washington Consensus – prescribed drastic medicine for economies such as Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. They were told to cut to cut government spending, even in the teeth of recession, and to raise interest rates, to sever links between banks and the state and to deregulate. Now western economies are prescribing almost the opposite medicine for themselves. They are cranking up fiscal and monetary policy, lowering interest rates and using state money to bail out banks.

From the Asian perspective that makes the west seem hypocritical at best. At worst, it looks as though the cherished assumptions about how best to run an economy are hokum. “We feel bitter,” says Mr Rhee. “We wanted to do these interventionist policies, but we were prohibited. So what model should we follow now?” China, he says, had been committed to gradual market reform. “The question was: what was the right speed? Now they are asking whether the destination is right or not.”