Japan owes a lot to China. Chinese demand for Japanese goods has helped Japan’s economy recover, while competition has pressured executives to start restructuring Japan’s companies and banks. Japan is an example of how China is offering two benefits to the global economy. One is the way in which China is acting as an economic engine, buying up ever-increasing amounts of goods and natural resources. The other is the flow of inexpensive Chinese goods that drag down consumer prices across the world. There are downsides, like the decline of manufacturing industries from Detroit and Perth. Folks in developed economies losing jobs or taking pay cuts would hardly agree that China’s rising influence is a good thing. But at the moment, China’s 9.5 percent growth rate is proving more of a blessing than a bane for countries like Japan. Quietly, at the start of this decade, Japanese companies began shifting production abroad, cutting costs, selling off extraneous businesses and paying down debt. ’The government also stepped up efforts to attract more foreign direct investment, something Japan had little use for in the past. Taken together, these actions largely prompted by China’s advance, have led to the most organic and convincing recovery Japan has seen in years. While Japan has much further to got to make its economy more globally competitive, it is worth noting how far it has come from the dark days of the late 1990s. There are many benefits inherent in China’s advance. One of them was spelled out by Anatole Kaletsky, an editor and economic columnist at The Times of London. He wrote on August 18 that China’s rise is making the richest nations even richer. Along with pushing down global prices of mass-produced goods, China’s influence may actually be pushing up the prices of products and services China does not or cannot make. That can be seen in the prices of things that China consumes — oil, financial services, luxury goods and real estate. Kaletsky said that as prices of luxury goods and financial services are driven higher, prosperous countries with service industries become wealthier, compared with manufacturing countries.