After my youngest brother’s death from AIDS in 1995 I traveled to the Orient with the intention of visiting several holy sites to help send Michael’s soul into the aether. I landed in Bangkok and booked a flight to Kunming in Yunnan, China’s southernmost province. I skipped the offered tours of the Shalin Stone Forest and caught the evening bus to Dali, an ancient walled city in the shadow of the Cangshan Mountains. Its roads end in the shallows of Erhai Lake. I stayed at a humble worker’s hostel and drank at a backpacker cafe.
Few of its citizens spoke English. The owner of the cafe was a fierce traditionalist. His pride of China’s past had been freed by the New Economy and one night he said to me, “You westerners fear our power.”
“More, we fear your chaos.” I thought that was a clever put down. The Chinese Cultural revolution had set China back twenty years, however that stumble was fast being erased by the industry of the present-day Middle Kingdom. The ten-year plan of the 90s catapulted the country into the position of the world’s leading manufacturer, as Western corporations off-shored tens of millions of jobs to China.
Nothing is made in the USA anymore.
Or anywhere else.
This week the Chinese Premier visited Washington on an official visit to the White House. Obama hailed the progress of the visitors’ economy, while criticizing the nation’s poor standing on human rights. Premier Hu was polite enough not to mention Git-mo, Abu-Ghabib, our two-million strong prison population, or draconian drug laws. Our two nations are linked in a death dance to see who will be #1 by mid-century and the odds are on China, as we have spent our treasure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are not friends.
Not the USA and the Chinese Communists who rule their country with an iron fist.
They remember the words of the Russian Communist leader, Khruschev.
“We will bury you.”
Almost no one in America can place who said this sentence, but I know on whose side rides the future.
Hi-yo Silver Away.
The Lone Ranger will come to the rescue.
Either that or the end of the world in 2012, because no one in America will like to cheer at an international sporting event.
“We’re # 2.”
ps Khruschev’s shoe had slipped off on the way to the podium. His secretary had handed him the shoe wrapped in a handkerchief. He kept it under the podium until reaching those famous words with a famous shoe.