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Are you avoiding Chinese-made food and consumer goods?

1800s dominated by British
1900s dominated by USA
2000s will be dominated by China

End of discussion.
 
1800s dominated by British
1900s dominated by USA
2000s will be dominated by China

End of discussion
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America and Britain will not be remembered for being perfect. They ruled the world at the barrel of a gun and were all too ready to subjugate entire nations to assert their own economic superiority. The British should be remembered for letting 1 million Irish starve to death to prop up British landowners. The Americans should be remembered for the clusterfuck that is Iraq, and for overthrowing Latin American governments during the turbulent 1960s thus robbing that entire continent of 30 years of progress.

Nevertheless, American and British citizens have something going for them that the Chinese don't. Freedom. The freedom to move around, to assemble, to lead private lives behind private curtains, to question authority, to provoke new ideas. This is absolutely imperative to founding a great society and that is essential to maintaining a superpower. You have to have something worth fighting for. All of the great empires of the world afforded their citizenry a high level of personal freedom, always striving toward greater liberalism. In an era where the average life expectancy was 23 and few people had ventured more than 30 miles from their birthplace, to be a Roman citizen and walk hundreds of miles along safe highways was something immensely coveted; Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park allowed a Briton to rail on and on about beheading the King without so much as a slap on the wrist.

China has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and that is a spectacular humanitarian achievement in its own right - but what's next? China is the world's factory, it can churn out material goods like no other country but can it be a progenitor of ideas? Can great discourse take place in the hallways of academic institutions that are under the watchful eye of the government? Will districts of Beijing and Shanghai attract artists and intellectuals the way that London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Tokyo have and still do? Will a Chinese person ever take the Nobel Prize for Literature (Gao Xingjian is exiled in France)? Will the Chinese ever invent a consumer good that is desired rather than simply be the workers who bolt it together? None of this is poised to happen as long as the Chinese restrict personal freedoms.
 
Hipster Duck said:
America and Britain will not be remembered for being perfect. They ruled the world at the barrel of a gun and were all too ready to subjugate entire nations to assert their own economic superiority. The British should be remembered for letting 1 million Irish starve to death to prop up British landowners. The Americans should be remembered for the clusterfuck that is Iraq, and for overthrowing Latin American governments during the turbulent 1960s thus robbing that entire continent of 30 years of progress.

Nevertheless, American and British citizens have something going for them that the Chinese don't. Freedom. The freedom to move around, to assemble, to lead private lives behind private curtains, to question authority, to provoke new ideas. This is absolutely imperative to founding a great society and that is essential to maintaining a superpower. You have to have something worth fighting for. All of the great empires of the world afforded their citizenry a high level of personal freedom, always striving toward greater liberalism. In an era where the average life expectancy was 23 and few people had ventured more than 30 miles from their birthplace, to be a Roman citizen and walk hundreds of miles along safe highways was something immensely coveted; Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park allowed a Briton to rail on and on about beheading the King without so much as a slap on the wrist.

China has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and that is a spectacular humanitarian achievement in its own right - but what's next? China is the world's factory, it can churn out material goods like no other country but can it be a progenitor of ideas? Can great discourse take place in the hallways of academic institutions that are under the watchful eye of the government? Will districts of Beijing and Shanghai attract artists and intellectuals the way that London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Tokyo have and still do? Will a Chinese person ever take the Nobel Prize for Literature (Gao Xingjian is exiled in France)? Will the Chinese ever invent a consumer good that is desired rather than simply be the workers who bolt it together? None of this is poised to happen as long as the Chinese restrict personal freedoms.
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Probably not in our lifetime. But eventually, I think they will. They have 93 years to work on it :p
 
Chinese visual art is white hot right now and widely collected in the West; their artists are fortunate to be living in the right place at the right time and to be able to comment on the rapid changes that are taking place in their country. As with the Cuban government, the Chinese are savvy enough not to block their leading artists from travelling and exhibiting sometimes critical works overseas. Such expressions of artistic freedom work as good PR for their country.
 
Hipster:

The Chinese civilization has a history of generating new ideas (the various schools of thought, a number of significant inventions and a history of exploration and trade) - what China hasn't been good at historically is having the ruling class take up these ideas even through periods of political change (case in point, Zheng He).

As to domination - I would hope that after the experience in 18 and 1900s, China wouldn't be following the footsteps of the forementioned imperial powers.

AoD
 
A70-11216
 
Alvin,

No doubt about it. The Chinese have come within an inch of becoming a global power only to squander it with incredible shortsightedness. One can only imagine how the map of the world would look today if Ming dynasty officials hadn't burned Zheng He's carefully drawn maps of the Indian Ocean and let his fleet of ships rot in the harbour.

They're not that blockheaded today, but clamping down on personal freedoms is certainly not a step in the right direction.

But maybe there's hope. The Chinese are very inventive - you're right - and in today's society where it's increasingly hard to control what people read, watch and see and how they conduct business. Chinese entrepreneurs don't play by the rules which already shows how enterprising and rebelliously brazen they can be. On one hand, you get the tainted consumer products and morally dubious business practices but on the other hand you get a burst of creativity and an environment where ideas can be freely exchanged. I may have to rethink my original position on China.
 
Hipster:

I think government, as important as it may be in the case of China, is a lesser worry to me than the "culture" - the govenment can only control so much, but cultural norms and taboos serves as a far better censor, preventing experimentation, invention and information exchange. Arguing that certain things shouldn't be said and done because it violates "Asian" sensibilities, oftentimes with blessing by the majority of the populace under the rubric of nationalism is an even more sinister and effective control mechanism, and could prove even more effective in holding a country back. So what if at the end of the day the country has a trillion dollars to play with when it's basically replicating itself as the new USA, consuming its way to hell? That in my eyes would have been a profound failure.

AoD
 
China has some major issues to confront going forward. The biggest is an aging population due to the one child rule. The fact that there are way more men than women due to that policy is a recipe for massive social tension.
 
nicetommy said:
That's according to the Chinese government... this is the same corrupt government that would have everyone believe that no one died at Tiananmen Square.
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you got a point there.
 
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