An old Cold War joke reports an international poll that asks the same question in every country: “Excuse me, what’s your opinion of the meat shortage?” The Poles say, “What’s meat?” The Chinese say, “What’s opinion?” The Americans say, “What’s shortage?” The Israelis say, “What’s excuse me?” No Chinese has ever run a community school board, a Little League association, or a volunteer fire brigade. For the past 2,500 years, and probably the past 5,000, orders in China have flowed downward from the top, through a vertical hierarchy. Everyone in the US has an opinion about politics — we have to choose our leaders and spend a lot of time thinking about it. Our opinion matters. Political opinions don’t have any practical value in China, so the practical Chinese don’t bother having them. China is run by a self-selecting committee of bureaucrats cherry picked from the top 1/10th of 1% of university entrance exam scores. I won’t live in such a system. If someone tried to replace our Constitution with that sort of elitist arrangement, I would take up arms against it. But it is a catastrophic error to underestimate the Chinese, and it is merely petulant to complain about how nasty the ChiComs are. China’s economy will grow this year while ours will shrink. China crushed the COVID-19 pandemic (no, it’s not fake news) while we’re still trying to figure out what to do about it. China well may dominate Artificial Intelligence, the driver of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Its government will spend $1.2 trillion on tech investments during the next five years, dwarfing what we spend. We aren’t dealing with a bunch of Marxist ideologues, but with a 5,000-year-old civilization that now wants to turn outward and assimilate most of the world. |
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