Please don't think that I'm anti-China.
I did write an article exposing the Beijing Olympics for their dishonesty, and held them up as a symbol for everything that's wrong with China.
I did write an article warning about the new economic bubble that is China, a bubble whose eventual bursting will spell catastrophe for the entire world.
I did write about the Chinese government's attempted bullying related to the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington D.C.
There's a lot that is good about China. Without a doubt, many of its woes come from trying to handle the largest population in the world. India, with the world's second-largest population, has its own set of problems. And the United States, coming in a distant third, is not without its share of problems either, and I haven't been shy about writing about them. (The U.S., that is. I don't know enough about India to write intelligently about that country.)
However, having acknowledged those arguments, I see that the rest of the world is selling its soul to China, becoming dependent on China for so many economic advantages - and the Chinese nation is ignoring its future, or perhaps flushing its future down the river, in a mad attempt to take over the world.
It's not a good thing for anybody. As I've said before, it's driven by greed - both inside China and out. It's a complicated problem, and not easy to fix. It's so complicated that entire books have been (hastily) written about the subject, and I'm not even going to try to explain or analyze it here. But take my word for it: it's a bad thing, and one day the entire civilized world have cause to regret it.
2 comments:
There's already upward pressure on wages in China as more Chinese move from the country to the cities to work in relatively high wage / somewhat higher danger jobs. Their manufacturing is unapologetically dirty. Their high-tech sector may have stolen many Western technologies, but they are beginning to transition into their own development powerhouse, with an eye to South Korea and Japan. In manufacturing and demographics, China looks like early 20th century America to me.
There is a very serious real estate bubble blowing up right now, with all of the construction that's been going on, and the government has started to try an protect its growth with trade barriers. The results of all this, however, are not particularly clear. It may be serious, especially if our investment firms are highly leveraged there, but our collapse must have done more damage to them, given how much they are leveraged here in that market.
I have very serious reservations about Chinese military / intelligence power, but they have other domestic challenges and are acting just like you'd expect a country in their position to -- at least they're predictably calculating.
That's what I was thinking. In many ways, China reminds me a lot of the U.S. during the 1940s and 1950s.
I like that characterization: "predictably calculating." It makes me giggle.
Post a Comment