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China is using 100's of years of Gained Wisdom During the ‘cold war,’ a term used to describe the tension between communist and capitalist countries that lasted from 1947 to 1991, one of the fears was a military conflict between Russia or China and the U.S. It didn’t happen. The potential of a military war instead morphed into an economic war. The U.S. was winning hands down for a long time, but not so much anymore. It used to be that the U.S. was number one in pretty much everything: education, technology, standard of living, economic and military strength, admired world leadership. It was leading the rest of the world into the future with the demonstrative power of democracy and free markets, new technological breakthroughs in automation, computers, communications, energy, medicine, space travel, to name a few. In recent years, a number of countries have surpassed the U.S. in specific areas, including consumer incomes, standard of living, and health care. The true economic powerhouse, however, has been China. Some of the statistics, and the speed with which they have changed, have been startling. Over the last ten years China’s economy has surged past those of Canada, Spain, Brazil, Italy, France, and Germany, and is expected to pass Japan this year, to become the second largest economy in the world, behind the U.S. Whether it’s manufacturing efficiency, high-speed rail-line technology, nuclear power plant construction, clean air energy technology, education, China is making impressive global inroads, even in areas where the U.S. still has significant dominance. Much of it has to do with China’s massive population, about which the U.S. can do nothing. For instance, while U.S. Internet companies dominate global headlines, China now has the world’s largest internet market as measured by the number of users. Yet internet use has only penetrated 22 percent of the population versus 75 percent in the U.S. Meanwhile, U.S. Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Facebook and Expedia are experiencing problems trying to transport their dominance into the Chinese market. Part of it is obstacles placed in their way by China’s government, in support of China’s state-controlled corporations. The result is Chinese internet companies like Tencent, and Baidu, cannot help but become world leaders. Here’s a statistic of more importance. U.S. universities will graduate 150,000 engineering students this year, while Chinese universities will graduate more than 500,000. I’ve had people tell me that’s an unfair comparison since China’s population is larger by approximately the same ratio. But that’s not the issue. The issue is the degree to which China has moved higher education to the top of its priorities, and the fact that 500,000 new engineers a year will probably come up with more high-tech innovations than 150,000 can. China’s great leap forward has been going through the same phases the early U.S. experienced as it worked toward becoming the world’s dominant economy. When we criticize China for the treatment of its underpaid and overworked labor force we sometimes forget that in the early years the U.S. also exploited its workers, even utilizing minorities and labor in 14 hour days in garment, textile, and shoe factories, coal mines and crop fields, which gave the country its initial low-cost jump start economically. It appears China is beginning to exit that phase and enter the next, of treating its workers better. In the past year Chinese workers have been allowed to form unions and strike for higher wages and shorter hours at various auto and electronics plants. The west would probably like to think that is due to the pressure put on China to improve human rights. However, China has never shown any inclination to bow to pressure in any area. The fact is that the next phase of China’s economic development must be, as it was in the U.S., to develop a strong domestic economy. To do so it needs to have a more prosperous population of consumers, rather than depending on low cost exports to other countries. Meanwhile, it can be said that China is eating America’s lunch, never taking its eyes off the goal, while we squabble among ourselves, paying no attention. That’s unfortunate. As Sam Houston said in the U.S. Senate in 1850, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand.” Yet, for the last 15 years the U.S. has divided itself in increasingly bitter time and energy-consuming political arguments: the morals of President Clinton, whether or not war should be waged to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, whether the country’s current problems are due to the depth of the economic hole dug during the last administration, or ineptness of the current administration in pulling the economy out of the hole. Meanwhile, China has kept its eye on the goal. It not only is making great economic strides, but on the financial side has become the world’s largest creditor nation, even as the U.S. has become the world’s largest debtor nation, with China holding much of its debt. The U.S. needs to interrupt its angry divisiveness and name-calling long enough to recognize the portent of what is going on. Unfortunately, in this particularly acrimonious mid-term election year, that is not going to happen. |
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quite humorous, I never aimed to take credit for it... as to your ethnic inferences, if that turns you on, then by all means delight yourself, as you equally so, expose what you'd otherwise deny.. 
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By ANDREW JACOBS  BEIJING — These are heady days for China’s state-controlled banks. Last month, the Agricultural Bank of China made its stock market debut, bringing in $22 billion for the largest public offering ever. A sister government-run bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, now has the highest stock market value of any bank in the world. But the windfalls have created an unusual problem for China: white-collar unrest. A few days after the Agricultural Bank went public, dozens of former bank employees stealthily gathered outside the headquarters of the country’s central bank. There, after distributing small Chinese flags, they quickly pulled on red and blue T-shirts that read, “Protect the Rights of Downsized Bank Workers.” By the time they had unfurled their protest banners, the game was over. Within minutes, a flock of police officers had swept everyone into five waiting public buses. By 8 a.m., when the People’s Bank of China opened its doors for business, the only sign of the rally was a strand of police tape. During the past two years, these unlikely agitators — conservatively attired but fiercely determined — have staged similar public protests in Beijing and provincial cities. They have stormed branch offices to mount sit-ins. A few of the more foolhardy have met at Tiananmen Square to distribute fliers before plainclothes police officers snatched them away. Strategizing via online message boards and text messages, they speak in code and frequently change cellphone numbers. Their acts of defiance are never mentioned in state-run news media. According to one organizer, a scrappy former bank teller named Wu Lijuan, there are at least 70,000 people seeking to regain their old jobs or receive monetary compensation, a sizable wedge of the 400,000 who were laid off during a decade-long purge. Like many other state-owned companies, the banks slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors. “They tossed us out like garbage,” Ms. Wu, 44, said before a recent protest, scanning fellow restaurant patrons for potential eavesdroppers. “All we’re asking for is justice and maybe to serve as a model for others who have been wronged.” ) For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail. “What the government fears most are people capable of organizing, and the bank workers have discovered their power,” said Renee Xia, international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. “The sad thing is that they’re not going to succeed because the more organized you are, the more harsh the government’s reaction.” Protest organizers are often thrown in “black jails” — extrajudicial holding pens — where they are sometimes beaten before local police officers arrive to take them back home. The recalcitrant and unrepentant sometimes end up in labor camps, where they can spend up to three years without being prosecuted for a crime. The years of fruitless protest and economic hardship have taken a toll. According to an informal tally by protest leaders, dozens of former bank staff members — most of them unsuccessful at finding new jobs — have committed suicide. “To be middle-aged and live off your elderly parents is humiliating, and it can become unbearable,” said Huang Gaoying, 49, a teller who was dismissed from the Industrial and Commercial Bank known as I.C.B.C., in 2002. Even if their numbers are smaller, the former bank employees are not unlike the millions of factory workers shed during the effort to restructure inefficient state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, they, too, clamored for redress but were eventually silenced. In 2000, the Supreme People’s Court put an end to any hope that the legal system might adjudicate such disputes, saying that plaintiffs from state companies had no standing in Chinese courts. Like the laid-off factory workers, the former bank employees have no independent trade union or association to take up their cause. -------------- End. Well, when the uprising continue and those fighting for equality and opportunity, break down the barriers, I wonder if the self absorbed, will rush there to try and gain from what these people facing challenge fight to over come. But as with human nature, many will rush in and seek to gain, and they will be ready to bad mouth these brave people who fight the injustice, and they will trample over theM, to try and gain from what these people give their efforts to face, as to challenges and, unfair process. But many of the people fighting, will and do know just what the effort in the 1960's America was all about. they un derstand how to fight for what is justice for all. Unfortunately, The greedy and do nothing, will stand back, and wait and rush in to claim what they can, and trample any and all of these fighters who push for fairness in systems. They will probably try and go there and play the elite game. And some of these same Chinese who wage the battle, will put them in their place, to show them; they have done nothing to help the challenge. but suddenly seek to claim gain by now, claiming to like being Chinese, when they spent more years, trying to be white, while looking down on those Chinese who fight and go through hardships and bias, struggling for the fairness of opportunity to exist. Sadly human ignorance functions in such ways. and greed and status chases, keep many blind even unto themselves. and suddenly they are now, ready to claim 100% Chinese, where before, they wanted to be and acts and mold themselves after anything and everything but the fact of being Chinese. it's kind like a repeat of how Hong Kong Chinese despised the Mainland, Chinese, because they did not try to re-mold themselves to pretend to be like the British. now those same Chinese, now want to identify with what the Mainland Chinese have achieved. what a funny world and the ways of people, that make up the world. but China has many challenges yet to come, with the high suicide rate, next comes the high intoxication both with drug and drink, and then comes the rise of the criminal conduct. the disparity always is the root of such conflicts and social changes. Land taken from poor farmers, is the same as sharecroppers having their crops taken, and many other oppressive things within the history of the US, are with their own parallels in China. But the time is coming sooner than later, that such things will boil over.. and reality will set in, by many means. China's history has always been one where one waring group has always sought to over-take another. and that cycle is far from being over.
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