The most recent cover of The Economist was quite an interesting one: an homage to Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover in which a distorted map of the world showed the streets of New York dominating the environment, with the rest of the United States an afterthought and China (along with Russia and Japan) mere blips on the horizon.

The Economist‘s cover does not have the United States as a corresponding blip—instead it’s depicted as a ruined land, with Wall Street a sinkhole, the Statue of Liberty a beggar, and swaths of homes foreclosed. The blips for China are Africa (land of natural resources) and Europe (land of designer handbags).

Because of the superficial similarity of these covers, it’s the differences that are the most interesting. The first is that The Economist is making a political statement with its cover, as it is wont to do. I’ll leave the parsing of The Economist‘s latest series of articles about China to the other wonks on this site, but it can be argued that the magazine views China as an inherently disruptive (not in the pejorative sense) force in the world. In terms of visual iconography it is arguing that China’s ascendancy comes at a fortuitous time for the nation, when America’s status as the tentpole of the global economy is, if not wrecked, substantially diminished.

The second difference is that while Saul Steinberg was a Romanian-born American articulating a point about his own country, the Economist cover is from a Westerner interpreting how he or she thinks China sees the world—it’s a foreign perspective, and could certainly provide adequate fodder for the Orientalist-studies folks out there.

So, regular contributors and readers of The Hypermodern: does The Economist‘s cover speak to some truth about China’s worldview, both from the government and on the streets? Is there any similarity to the perspective of a New Yorker in 1976 to a Beijinger in 2009?

Many thanks to Strange Maps, where explications and larger versions of these covers can be found here and here.