Johnson took the 100 meters today over the 6'2" China whiz.
China's "success" is on the backs of its working class.
Howard Dean, Howard Dean, pick up the white courtesy phone.
Posted on 06/11/2005 2:58:59 PM PDT by Pokey78
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.
How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even free-ish - society.
Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.
The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.
China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.
Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.
India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so.
China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.
He couldn't afford the trailer?
Viagra won't sell well then. No one will need it. A grizzled old hag will draw wolf whistles in a few years.
Missing from this fantastic essay is the statistic of China suffering from 47 million or so bureaucrats. I doubt whether the country can survive that mass of inertia.
Another great one from Steyn.
That tells you a lot about the hidden fragility of the state there; they're scared s***less of what is basically a yoga club.
***He couldn't afford the trailer?***
He couldn't afford the elevator!
Very intesting take by Steyn. He is likely 100% correct, as he nearly always is.
Is there any way to hire this guy for our State Department or are we going to be stuck forever with warmed over Clintonites??
Expect to see the Chinese women scrambling for power in the up coming years. Who could stop them? Considering the culture just imagine the jolt to their collective psyches.
Good point. This piece was so spot-on geopolitically I first thought I was reading Victor Davis Hanson :-)
Cheers!
My opinion has always been that India is really the potential power of the east. Despite all the problems there, the biggest thing they have going for them is more freedom, and the basis of a western legal system given to them by the British that does respect property rights.India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas.
Is that not another definition for Saudi Arabia. Steyn rules
If you can restate what you are saying I will try to respond. If you are just a DU troll, don't bother as you won't be around long enough to discuss it.
Thanks for the ping, Pokey! Steyn is the pentultimate wordsmith of our time.
Thanks.
I suppose I was so in awe with your brilliant use of the language that I was momentarily thrown off kilter. However, I think I have now recovered.
But to restate: Nixon was a fool for 'opening' China,....
Nixon's trip to China was not as successful as I would have liked but he did attempt to unlock China's isolation that had existed since before the building of the Great Wall, which exemplified it, and later when their mistrust of the outside was exacerbated by the Opium Wars, and finally when FDR, then Truman, abandoned Chiang Kai-shek to the Communists. Mao Tse Tung immediately clamped the lid on things and killed millions of his own people. Nixon made an effort to break that mindset and relieve tensions in the world. That move also drove a wedge, of sorts, between China and the USSR>
.... and if he were not a Republican, no one here--on FR, where you are reading this post--would argue he was right in doing so.
I suspect you are as wrong about that as you are the rest. What happened to that nonsense about Armond Hammer?
Our present situation with China was brought about by our good friends Bill and Hillary, not Nixon. Whether China sees the light of the advantages of freedom and free enterprisae, as envisioned by Nixon, or becomes and idiot Communist Superpower, as envisioned by the Clintons, has yet to be decided.
I live in Vietnam part of each year. One day, I asked a taxi driver whether he had read one of the local commie run fishwrappers. He just chuckled and said that no one reads those things. The populace understands the hand they've been dealt, they all want out.
The only problem is that free enterprise creats an affluent middle class, and affluence is a path to political power. By the time the military is powerfull enough, so may be the middle class which will take a dim view of trading their x-boxes for military conquest.
Why kill people for stuff when you can just buy it?
thanks Pokey. Steyn is a brilliant analyst even when he's not as funny as usual.
I agree with you and have made that point myself at times, maybe even on this thread. We need to keep exposing others to that fact.
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