Thursday, July 07, 2005
it's a small world - local stories of China and Japan
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Shopping on 14th Street in its myriad 99-cent stores for reading glasses (perfectly adequate quality; per my ophthalmologist, although the plastic ones keep breaking and I keep losing the metal-framed), I began to chat with one of the owners, who sat at the cash register, ordering the help around in a good-natured manner. Turns out he owns another such store on the northern periphery of our area. We chatted, about the US economy and our entrepreneurs outsourcing labor-intensive industries to China and technological work to India. Daniel – that was his name – disagreed with my understanding of this balance, indicating that the Chinese technology was the main competition for the West, in manufacturing as well as in services. After some hesitation, he suggested that China would become the new US in the next 50 years. It came out that he is a graduate of the South China University of Technology, where he taught for two years, before emigrating 21 years ago, and also owns a local computer service firm with a few dozen employees.
Intrigued, I looked up www.scut.cn, and a Chinese website materialized. By punching the word “English” it morphed into something legible. The university is in Guangzhou, two hours north of Hong Kong, founded 1952 and by 1960 it had become an important institution. Now it has 13,000 full-time students and 3,800 professors, and runs symposiums and conferences, and partners with a US firm in microchip development. It was founded with US-taught educators – Daniel’s father was one of them, in the days when we Americans had not yet become a service and consumer-oriented society. Daniel’s prophecy may come sooner than expected.
Speaking of the Indians, a recognized threat to the American computer programming professions, Daniel considers them a lesser technological challenger than China. But they too have an ethic that frightens Americans, that of learning all they can and working at it all the time. American students win games and American Idol contests, Indian students here win spelling bees and Westinghouse (now Intel) science competitions. The 21 million Indians abroad (of which 1.6 million reside in the US) are relatively unencumbered by ideological constraints and are advancing economically and politically. They frequently intermarry in the 2nd generation. Consequently, such 3rd World countries as Guiana and Fiji have become Indian- dominated, without much strife.
The Chinese have similar ambitions and lack of constraints, but do not integrate with quite the same ease. On the other hand, their mother country has become a major military power, and the potential of conflict is discussed widely, particularly in regard to their national policy of integrating Taiwan. As sensitive an observer as Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly, whose pro-Serb views (reflecting the writings of Rebecca West) had substantial influence on US policy in the Balkans during the early 1990s, has written a realistic review of the US military power position vis-à-vis the Chinese. Daniel tends to pooh-pooh any warlike intentions on part of the Chinese – they are getting all they want, without a war. He suggests their intentions are of economic and not military conquest. In support of this thesis, note the news stories of their intended purchases of Maytag and Unocal.
As a side observation, the Chinese have some historic rights to be angry with us, although we defeated their 1940s conquerors, the Japanese, in World War Two and helped reestablish an independent China. In the late 18th and most of the 19th century we had helped the British imperialists turn millions of Chinese into opium addicts.
There had been a world trade balance problem, just like now. Silk and tea from China became so popular in England and America that the Westerners did not have sufficient trade goods to offset the trade imbalance, and the East India Company, in British-controlled India, had opium poppy plantations, and started selling the drug to the Chinese masses. Quing Emperors’ edicts did not stop the English and their US allies, ship-owners of the most prominent families, who provided some of the hulls for the transport to Canton. In 1839 a Chinese official destroyed $6M worth of opium, causing the first Opium War (1839-42), in which the British traders won official access to harbors. The second Opium War (1856-60) gave them Hong Kong and the right to trade in opium, a humiliating defeat for the Chinese.
A local story: one of the traders was Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather. He went out to China to make his competence ($100,000) as a partner in Russell and Co, and returned after nine years, in 1846, at 37 a multi-millionaire in today’s terms, to become part of the social circle (they lived in Colonnade Row, across from the now Public Theatre, then the Astor residence), build a Hudson Valley mansion, Algonac, designed by Alexander Jackson Downing, and invest in mining. The Crash of 1857 ruined him, and at 50 he returned to Hong Kong to recover the fortune, largely with the aid of the Civil War, for which he supplied morphine as painkiller for the injured.
Shopping on 14th Street in its myriad 99-cent stores for reading glasses (perfectly adequate quality; per my ophthalmologist, although the plastic ones keep breaking and I keep losing the metal-framed), I began to chat with one of the owners, who sat at the cash register, ordering the help around in a good-natured manner. Turns out he owns another such store on the northern periphery of our area. We chatted, about the US economy and our entrepreneurs outsourcing labor-intensive industries to China and technological work to India. Daniel – that was his name – disagreed with my understanding of this balance, indicating that the Chinese technology was the main competition for the West, in manufacturing as well as in services. After some hesitation, he suggested that China would become the new US in the next 50 years. It came out that he is a graduate of the South China University of Technology, where he taught for two years, before emigrating 21 years ago, and also owns a local computer service firm with a few dozen employees.
Intrigued, I looked up www.scut.cn, and a Chinese website materialized. By punching the word “English” it morphed into something legible. The university is in Guangzhou, two hours north of Hong Kong, founded 1952 and by 1960 it had become an important institution. Now it has 13,000 full-time students and 3,800 professors, and runs symposiums and conferences, and partners with a US firm in microchip development. It was founded with US-taught educators – Daniel’s father was one of them, in the days when we Americans had not yet become a service and consumer-oriented society. Daniel’s prophecy may come sooner than expected.
Speaking of the Indians, a recognized threat to the American computer programming professions, Daniel considers them a lesser technological challenger than China. But they too have an ethic that frightens Americans, that of learning all they can and working at it all the time. American students win games and American Idol contests, Indian students here win spelling bees and Westinghouse (now Intel) science competitions. The 21 million Indians abroad (of which 1.6 million reside in the US) are relatively unencumbered by ideological constraints and are advancing economically and politically. They frequently intermarry in the 2nd generation. Consequently, such 3rd World countries as Guiana and Fiji have become Indian- dominated, without much strife.
The Chinese have similar ambitions and lack of constraints, but do not integrate with quite the same ease. On the other hand, their mother country has become a major military power, and the potential of conflict is discussed widely, particularly in regard to their national policy of integrating Taiwan. As sensitive an observer as Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly, whose pro-Serb views (reflecting the writings of Rebecca West) had substantial influence on US policy in the Balkans during the early 1990s, has written a realistic review of the US military power position vis-à-vis the Chinese. Daniel tends to pooh-pooh any warlike intentions on part of the Chinese – they are getting all they want, without a war. He suggests their intentions are of economic and not military conquest. In support of this thesis, note the news stories of their intended purchases of Maytag and Unocal.
As a side observation, the Chinese have some historic rights to be angry with us, although we defeated their 1940s conquerors, the Japanese, in World War Two and helped reestablish an independent China. In the late 18th and most of the 19th century we had helped the British imperialists turn millions of Chinese into opium addicts.
There had been a world trade balance problem, just like now. Silk and tea from China became so popular in England and America that the Westerners did not have sufficient trade goods to offset the trade imbalance, and the East India Company, in British-controlled India, had opium poppy plantations, and started selling the drug to the Chinese masses. Quing Emperors’ edicts did not stop the English and their US allies, ship-owners of the most prominent families, who provided some of the hulls for the transport to Canton. In 1839 a Chinese official destroyed $6M worth of opium, causing the first Opium War (1839-42), in which the British traders won official access to harbors. The second Opium War (1856-60) gave them Hong Kong and the right to trade in opium, a humiliating defeat for the Chinese.
A local story: one of the traders was Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather. He went out to China to make his competence ($100,000) as a partner in Russell and Co, and returned after nine years, in 1846, at 37 a multi-millionaire in today’s terms, to become part of the social circle (they lived in Colonnade Row, across from the now Public Theatre, then the Astor residence), build a Hudson Valley mansion, Algonac, designed by Alexander Jackson Downing, and invest in mining. The Crash of 1857 ruined him, and at 50 he returned to Hong Kong to recover the fortune, largely with the aid of the Civil War, for which he supplied morphine as painkiller for the injured.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 10:29 AM 
