Sol Sanders,
World Tribune
If there is anyone out there as old as I, he may remember the legendary Charlie Chaplin silent film routine that ran something like this: the actor is getting all dressed up in his Sunday best, about to go out for a very important appointment.
When an attentive female partner surveys him from all angles, she suddenly finds a loose thread. And with two long, poised fingers, she delicately picks it off. But it doesn’t come free. And she then begins to pull the thread. And you have guessed it: she pulls, and pulls, and pulls until the whole wonderfully stylish garment simply comes completely apart and dissolves into a pile of loose threads on the floor. And our poor little Tramp is left there, shivering in his underwear.
There is no lack of shine on the current image of China, at least in most quarters, certainly for “the realists” as they are wont to be called in Western geopolitical circles.
In less than three decades, the Beijing regime – with the help of an enthusiastic globalizing world of multinational corporations – has leap-frogged into becoming a leading economy. Vast areas of an even vaster country have been transformed. Shanghai has regained its position as “Queen of the Orient”. Although in this postcolonial age, that kind of designation might be considered inappropriate as it was not in the pre-World War II days when it was even then a leading world city, albeit with more than its quota of dead bodies collected each morning from the streets.
In fact, China has become “the world’s factory” – producing enormous amounts of consumer goods at bargain prices for the discount stores of the U.S., and even increasingly penetrating the protectionist European Union. The howls of the mercantilists there looking at their negative trade balances have almost reached the crescendo in the U.S. Foreign exchange has piled up in China’s central bank coffers at levels unknown even for the Japanese and the Taiwanese only a few years ago. Indeed, the Chinese are the leading member of that privileged circle buying large chunks of American debt at an ever diminishing return.
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