"Oh, there will be a war, sure enough. It has to happen."

He meant a war between China and Japan. It's not really the kind of view you expect to have offered to you in your own front room a few days before Christmas. Particularly from a Chinese acquaintance whose advice up to now had been that if we wanted to make money in China we should press on pretty sharpish as he was pretty sure that China's economic miracle has five or maybe ten years to run at best before it falls apart.

Over the last week or so though I have noticed that a number of those folk paid handsomely to speculate at New Year in the quality press on the great global trends have also flagged the current friction between China and Japan as something which could only too easily ignite into a real crisis. It's a prospect that puts all of the encouragement to invest and engage with Asia into a rather different perspective.

The immediate issue is of course the ownership and control of a scattering of tiny uninhabited islands somewhere in the East China Sea. People in the west though may not be aware quite how profound the antipathy between China and Japan actually is. 

My own appreciation of the depth of history that colours relations between China and Japan began nearly nine years ago when the surprise acquisition of MG Rover's assets by the Nanjing Automobile Company has me researching everything (and anything) I could about the company , the city and all and any other relevant facts.

It was early August 2005. The world generally was acknowledging with regret and sadness the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the consequent destruction of life and property.

In dramatic contrast, the Nanjing City web site was alive with unrepentant bitterness that the death of hundreds of thousands of Nanjing citizens at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army in 1937 appeared to have been forgotten by the rest of the world. The gruesome statistics are an area of dispute but the Chinese case is that deaths in Nanjing exceeded those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The 'Rape of Nanjing' is only a particularly low point in the long and complicated relationship between China and Japan (with other - but perhaps less overwhelming - atrocities during conflicts from this period) and the general attitude of current Japanese prime minister Abe to aspects of his country's military history is a further strain.

Its is of course a relationship that goes back far into history - Chinese friends have pointed out to me the considerable borrowings from China that have underpinned many aspects of Japanese culture. These include elements of religion, government and architectural style and above all the characters that make up the written language.

Japans re-opening to the world from 1870 took place as the last throes of the Qing empire began along with and the early decades of China's century of humiliation. Japan no doubt learned lessons that shaped its own engagement with the West from the errors China had made thirty years earlier.

However by the late 1940's both countries and their economies were devastated by conflict with each other, with the wider world for Japan, and internally for China. Japan found itself being reinvented by the United States largely in its own image while China embarked on a profoundly painful - and often self-destructive - attempt to remodel itself leading to the situation today. Japan's economic miracle has spluttered and stumbled for the last two decades while China has bedazzled the world with growth and success .

In both countries though, from their different current situations, a new nationalism is flexing a muscle or two. Mr Abe's deference to military history in Japan has been mentioned. Xi Jiping's 'China Dream' initiative has so far emphasised more positive aspects of Chinese self-belief and confidence.

However, acute China-watchers have seen the long anticipated fall from grace of Zhou Yongkang the former internal security chief as part process placing supreme power in Xi's hands in a way that hasn't been part of the Chinese process for decades. Xi's family history places him in a different relationship to the military too. One doesn't wish to be overly cynical but if growth were to falter and much vaunted efforts to control popular concerns such as urban pollution fail, an appeal to darker aspects of nationalism might be a sinister distraction.

We have become accustomed in the West to parroting the Clinton mantra 'It's the economy, stupid' as the be-all and end-all to political discourse. The willful disruption to prosperity that real conflict might bring about might seem unthinkable. But with so many of our own eggs now nestling in a Chinese basket it might be sensible to factor it into our calculations.