Yiwu, you naughty racist, making wild generalisations about we "Westerners", as though there is a clear line between the Chinese, who write Chinese history and we "Westerners", who don't.
It's great that Chinese feel very secure. I have worked hard to ensure they do and I'm delighted with my success. But we westerners, "your guys", are in fact doing a spot of writing of Chinese history ourselves.
It's true that without Chairman Mao, there would have been a very different China and world, but that's not necessarily a bad thing and judging from the pay rates in China and how many people ended up dead and fleeing to live with we Westerners, it might have been a very good thing if he too had be judged by that anti-authoritarian monkey which saw everyone below him "purged" or worse at some time or other.
Mao was just another in the eons-old litany of murderous alpha male dominance hierarchy confiscatory thugs which all homo sapiens suffer from time to time. Whether it's David Koresh, Jim Jones, Saddam, Stalin, Hitler or Idi Amin, they pop out of the woodwork and do their horrifying thing. The strange thing is the adulatory mobs they seem able to inspire into a frenzy of mindless mantras which invariably involve enthusiastic violence and destruction.
We all like leaders, because we know that some people have more talent than we do. So we cast our lot in with Bernie Schwartz of Globalstar and Loral fame, Irwin Jacobs who is the inspiration of QUALCOMM, King George II who will save America from Islamic Jihad and Chairman Mao who will weave magic in the proletariat and defend China against the evil Westerners. Unfortunately, too often, their feats are clay. They all look like great leaders, at least to a lot of people, sufficient to give them a flock, until things go wrong. Knowing who are great and who have feet of clay is a tricky thing.
But back to who is Chinese and who is not, so we can know who has approved thinking and is writing Chinese history and who isn't.
Would New Zealand bananas be Chinese? Bananas are people who fled China over the past 100 years and more and are Kiwis. They are called bananas being "yellow on the outside, but white in the inside". Which isn't quite an accurate description, but it's apt. I think they wrote some history. Very important history.
Would I be Chinese? Mother born in China but me born here? Would she? Anyway, she wrote some Chinese history and so did her parents. They lived in Dalian running some oil industry stuff. I'm sure you have heard a little of the history of the British Empire in China and Standard Oil too. They wrote some history.
Today, Made in China is ubiquitous. Most things we buy are Made in China. We are writing the history of China again. This is the era of exporting. Umpty million Chinese are working in export factories with that money funding further development in China. They produce 5 toasters and the income from 2 or 3 or 4 of the toasters provides the income to buy 1, 2, or 3 of them in China, so Chinese get toasters too.
Similarly, with that amazing CDMA2000 phragmented photon cyberphone technology, which is going to totally rewrite the history of China. I have been writing flat out. I have put my life's savings into writing the history flat out. Our Great and Wonderful Chairman Irwin is writing China's history and he's not doing it with anyone being run over with tractors, beaten or re-educated in rural poverty. On the contrary, the rural people are swarming to be educated in the magic of CDMA so they too can join in the revolution.
This is a revolution of peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, longevity, prosperity, fun and love. China is joining the revolution started by me, who is writing your history right now. Okay, you can say I am Chinese, so you could assert still that Chinese history is being written by the Chinese, but I don't think Irwin is Chinese and he is writing Chinese history flat out too.
My point is that the world is so integrated, including China, that making distinctions between countries and cultures is increasingly difficult. Heck, look at Jay Chen and his tribe if you want to see blurred lines.
Hu Jintao, Irwin and I are writing Chinese history while you write about it here. Now that I think about it, you are writing Chinese history right here in SI, joining up with the rest of the world and integrating with it and being subsumed by it.
The Luddite anti-globalisation people see the process and don't like it. Too bad for them. The rest of us are writing history. New Zealand [Auckland anyway] is swarming with Chinese so our history is being rewritten too. We are increasingly a colony of China. It's a process of write and be written.
The world will look quite different in 100 years and the Long March and Standard Oil in Dalian will be distant memories - artifacts of history. Even CDMA2000 will be old technology which wove some magic for a few decades and started a revolution - the mobile cyberspace revolution. China will be in the vortex of that revolution, not on the periphery or beyond the event horizon. You'd have to go to somewhere in Africa to avoid It and write your own history, untouched by the revolution.
The days of isolated countries, writing their own history with a 'lift ourselves by our own bootstraps' political system, such as Albania, North Korea and China are numbered. It just doesn't work. There isn't the capital, knowledge or population to enable bootstrap lifting. We the Sheeple and the free world are moving too fast and we have the numbers. Inward-looking, introspective, 'write our own history' cultures are doomed. India is still trying to bootstrap themselves, but even they have let a glimmer of revolutionary light in from CDMA2000 and now they'll get moving.
You should not feel at all secure, there is some big history being written and you Chinese are right there in the script, and with quite a big part to play. To play a good part, it will be necessary to learn the lines of the actors who do well. I see you have learned English - that's a good start. Learning the mystical incantations of CDMA2000 will be another good move.
It's going to be a lot of fun and the fun has begun [as Chairman Jacobs has said].
Mqurice |
