Friday, January 7, 2011
"... the thing is, or at least the way I see it tends to suggest, that it's fine for China to chug along quite nicely by grafting a Victorian England laisez faire business ethos and the manufacturing prowess of 20th century America onto a highly efficient Leninist bureaucracy and setting it loose on a vastly under utilized and extremely low cost labour market that remains relatively docile and willing to fall in line... yes, they can be wildly successful simply cloning certain aspects of the last three hundred years of Western economic history including, oddly enough, given their actions in Africa and elsewhere, replicating the worst abuses of our colonialist past, and feeding these cannibalized bits and pieces of Adam Smith et al through the entrails of communist orthodoxy... but what happens when simply regurgitating another culture's past is not enough? If China is merely a selective reiteration of old ideas and methods, commanded into being by the politburo, how can it ever produce anything new and of lasting value? America was new - it was innovative, dynamic, progressive - it redefined human culture as a whole in a way that was so attractive that even those people who resented it couldn't help but imitate it, envy it. Will anyone ever say or think that about China? I'm not saying they won't - who knows, this civilizational eugenics project may indeed evolve into something truly dynamic and capable of stirring the imaginations of the wider world - but a rampant GDP is that and that only, a rampant GDP - and in ten or twenty years when that number eclipses its American counterpart that's all it will be, a bigger number. To my mind, to imagine that come that day the world will step into a new and golden age would be at best to lose oneself to wishful thinking... my guess is, rather than a new day, we'll wake up to something we've seen before and had hoped to never see again..."
