China Rising

I hope you were able to look in on the Olympic Opening Ceremony from Beijing last night. What the world witnessed was the coming out party for the next global superpower.

The presentation was a tour de force combining modern technology with ancient philosophy, cooperative effort with individual initiative, beauty with bulk, the sentimental with the inspiring and discipline with creativity. In short, it was a tribute to the yin and the yang, the age-old Chinese search for harmony in the reconciliation and melding of opposites. And it was all done on such a massive scale as to leave no doubt that China is the Leviathan of the world.

China is home to one-fifth of all humanity. It has a GDP now ranked third and on track to be first by 2030. Its population stands at 1.3 billion persons. It still has a larger number of citizens in abject poverty than live in the entire United States, but now also has a larger middle class than does the United States. Its burgeoning metropolitan centers boast infrastructure and amenities that make most American cities embarrassingly decrepit by comparison.

It graduates four times as many engineers a year as do the universities of the United States, and its children outperform ours in comparative tests. They are competitive, have a sense of themselves on the upswing of history and are hungry for more.

Think of China as being where the USA was in 1890. They are at the point of rapid industrialization, where increasing prosperity and opportunity coexist with growing pollution and overcrowding. But they enjoy the benefit of the lessons of our and the other industrialized nations' successes and shortcomings. Last night's program remained mindful of the spiritual and human elements of progress throughout, something Americans often seem to have trouble doing.

China is intrinsically neither our friend nor our enemy. They are a great nation embarked on an exciting path of development that promises great benefits for their people and society. If our society proves unable to inspire its people to a similar dedication, particularly with regards to an ethic of achievement in education, and a commitment to the development and maintenance of a modern infrastructure in all its aspects, we shall surely be easily pushed aside in the next few decades.

Such is the course of the rise and decline of peoples and nations.