“AND HOW DID YOU FIND CHINA?”
“VERY LARGE, CHINA.”
…..from the play PRIVATE LIVES by Noel Coward.
Five thousand years of history. What a magnificent culture. What a history. What art, poetry, philosophy, science. Of course this was punctuated by politics and wars.
The T’ang Dynasty ( 618-907 ) was amazing for its unification, culture, peacefulness, fairness in governance. Read some T’ang poetry and you will be amazed at how modern it is. Here is a sample:
It was their golden age.
China has come together and fallen apart many times. Its land mass is so huge, its population always growing, and its 3 regions so diverse from wind blown steppes to the central loess plateau to the southern rice area this amazing land has been unified and then torn apart by war lords, emperors or invaders only to repeat the process. And yet, it endures. Perhaps ancestor worship connects the past with the present and the present with the future giving a continuum that other cultures don’t have. Mao tried to wipe that continuity out in his disastrous Cultural Revolution which wasn’t cultural and wasn’t a revolution—it was a slaughter. Could it come apart again?
With 1.2 billion people today, we are seeing a huge China that embraces the modern world with a passion merging central communist control with market capitalism ---- and they are doing damned well.
China historically has not been militarily hegemonistic , its land mass and population has been too big. But it now dominates the South East Asian area. Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia all look to China for guidance and for support. China has reached out to Africa as well. It is not always humanistic, sometimes far from it, but never the less, China is the dominant player in a major part of the world and is growing. Predictions are that its economy will be the world’s biggest in less than 20 years. It need not wage military war; economic competition is more than sufficient to gain suzerainty over much of the world.
Watch out USA, they own a huge amount of our debt---debt that pays for our unbalanced budgets and items like Iraq. They might stop buying to let us afford our excesses. They might even sell off our debt.
~Ray
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