When Worlds Collide

China has survived the global contagion of 2008. That is no surprise to anyone. As it was written in 2007, “Today’s China,
Communist though it may be, is playing the U.S. game. They have even modified
their ideals to match the capitalist system.” This discussion is about how the world comes to this point in history. 


Cliff Potts
September 27, 2014

When Worlds Collide

 In the days of the Nixon White House, in the attempt to
unravel the Watergate scandal, a phrase emerged as a national idiom: “Follow
the money!” It means that to find who is involved in some activity one needs
only to find out who paid what to whom. This detective work has successfully
led to more than one conviction.

Even before Watergate, tracking the accounting trail led,
eventually, to the only crime ever hung on the notorious Alphonse Gabriel Capone (or Al
“Scarface” Capone, as he was better known). His conviction?
Tax evasion!  The one time crime lord and
reprehensible boss of Chicago’s
underbelly went down hard because he did not give Uncle Sam a cut of his
illegal action. Had Capone paid his taxes, when prohibition was finally
repealed, the self described Used Furniture Dealer, the kingpin of the Chicago
Outfit, would probably not have spent a day in Federal Prison. He died in
prison on January 25, 1947 of complications due to third-stage neurosyphilis.[1]

Another maxim is equally valid: “Watch what they do.” When
dealing with political situations where oral deception and rhetorical slight of
hand are so common that it is assumed and overlooked, this axiom is even more
important. When watching China
and the European Union  (or any country,
for that matter), the rhetoric is far less important than the actions.

There has been discussion on the left that the globalization
is a fancy word for Pax Americana Imperialism. For the sake of argument, within
the discussion in this section, let us assume that the accusation has some
validity. It will provide a platform from which to build a framework for events
in the world today.

Empires are arrogant entities. Not only do they develop the
colonies at the expense of the homeland, but they export to the colony the
cultural distinction of the Mother Country. Further, they reward the colonies
which best exemplify the culture of the Imperial Center.
This is how Paul’s home city of Tarsus
became a free Roman city before Paul was born. This is how much of the New
World was given the fullness of the Hispanic heritage and culture from Spain.
This is how Great Britain
influenced the globe. Not discounting Dutch and French imperialism, for the
past 400 years the Anglo-Saxon blood line has held the world in its grasp.

The domination of the British Empire was inherited by the United States following World War One when the United Kingdom,
suffering from cultural fatigue, abdicated the Super Power position. The United States,
as the only Western nation to survive virtually unscathed from World War Two,
initially stood in opposition to Communism. Recently, according to critics and
proponents alike, the United
States has worked with great diligence to
spread it form of democratic capitalism around the globe. Those who have bought
into this economic expression (i.e. Russia,
China, Vietnam, India,
and the greater part of the European Union) are reaping the rewards for
aligning with the U.S.
economics. The Islamic world, which is violently resisting the presence of U.S.
occupation forces, is suffering from that resistance.

To compare the Democratic Republic of the United States of America to any
previous empire may seem distasteful. That is because the average citizen of
the United States
does not understand what has been inherited. We can refer to the U.S. as a Super Power, we can call her a Global
Leader, but at the opening of the 21^st Century, the United States
is an Imperial force. It is well past time for the citizens of the U.S.
to accept what has been formed and act responsibly.

The U.S.
has softened the hard edges with the adoption of the 13^th Amendment
to the Constitution of the United
States in 1865, the 14^th
Amendment in 1866, and the 15^th Amendment in 1870. It further
softened its hard political edges in 1920 with the passage of the 19^th
Amendment allowing woman to vote in national elections, eradicating the Poll
Taxes in 1964 under the 24^th Amendment, and the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964.

Of the Asian countries, the only one who seems to be
attempting to export their culture is Japan. From the 1960s through the
1980s, Japan experienced
phenomenal economic (10% in the 1960s, 5% in the 1970s, and 4% in the 1980s)
growth to the point that it was addressing the U.S. on equal terms.[2]
One of the best works to illustrate this point is the Japanese best seller The Japan That Can Say No.

This work detailed how Japan
was culturally and economically independent of the United States. It set the tone for
much of the rhetoric of the late 1980s until the “Peace Dividend” recession
under George H.W. Bush slowed the U.S.
buying spree in Japan
and subsequently burst the Japanese housing bubble.

Through much of the 1990s, Japan made few statements. Lately, with
the manufacturing power of China
behind them, Japan is
attempting to establish, a cultural foothold in the United States, using anime in
television, books, and internet. Anything Asian is mystically better than
anything western in the popular young U.S. mindset. The distinction
between China and Japan is
entirely lost in the current, popular world view.

Google’s Youtube.com is full of Japanese animation free to
whoever can find it. Japanese animation began in the 1980s as an export with
the full support of the Japanese Government. Japan, in spite of the trappings of
democracy is still a nationalistic empire. While their cartoons are
entertaining the youth today, they have yet to come to terms with any admission
of any wrong doing in Asia during World War
Two. This has been noted by China,
both North and South Korea,
and Singapore.

India,
whose recorded history predates Egypt’s
Old Kingdom, with its fist known settlement
dating to around 7000 B.C.E., has not made any attempts to export their
culture. They have a strong media presence through the Hindu film industry, but
this is predominately for internal consumption. It could be that the West has
already absorbed much of the Indian culture through Great
Britain’s occupation of India dating back to 1856. It could
be that India, like ancient China,
with a long proud culture views Western culture as barbaric.

Kashmir is the region in the
northwestern Indian subcontinent. It is bounded to the northeast by the Uygur
Autonomous Region of Xinjiang and to the east by the Tibet Autonomous Region
(both parts of China), to
the south by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, to the west by Pakistan, and to the northwest by Afghanistan.
The region, with a total area of 85,806 square miles (222,236 square km), has
been the subject of dispute between India and Pakistan since the partition of the
Indian subcontinent in 1947. The northern and western portions are administered
by Pakistan
and comprise three areas: Azad Kashmir, Gilgit, and Baltistan, the last two
being part of a territory called the Northern Areas. The southern and
southeastern portions constitute the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian- and
Pakistani-administered portions are divided by a “line of control” agreed upon
in 1972. In addition, China
became active in the eastern area of Kashmir in the 1950s and
since 1962 has controlled the northeastern part of Ladakh (the easternmost
portion of the region).[3] 

As much of the power
shift discussion revolves around China. China has an established culture
which dates to before the first century C.E. The Shang dynasty, the second
dynasty in Chinese history, dates from around 1700 B.C.E. China discovered gunpowder in 142 C.E. during
the time of the Roman Empire in the West. China
was making paper around 150 C.E. The compass was developed in China between 1040 and 1044 C.E.
The world’s first known moveable type was invented in China around 1040 C.E. One has to
wonder what the world would be like today had Rome
and China
engaged in free-trade. How a Rome
equipped with cannon and rockets would fare against invading barbarians?
Buddha, the enlightened one, came out of India
around 138 B.C.E. China,
for all her civilization and glory, was “discovered” by Marco Polo.

China was not as isolated as was once taught. Marco
Polo was dispatched to serve as ambassador to the Grand Khan Kublai in
1264, after the Mongol Army sacked Soldaia and took control of it in 1239.
Soldaia, sitting on the North Shore of the Black Sea,
is called Sudak today. However, the East-West exchange began in earnest at the
behest of the Khan. China, at
that time, was roughly the size of the U.S., and they considered
themselves the “giver of culture,” or “the seat of culture.” Their confidence
in their superiority was  confidently expressed.
If anyone wanted to be truly civilized, that person could immerse themselves in
the Chinese way. This, of course got them into difficulties when the British
took over. This resulted in the Opium Wars in 1834, and 1856, and the Boxer
Rebellion in 1899.

With the exception of Korea
and Vietnam, Tibet, and recently Kashmir China has not been inclined to
mobilize their vast population in an effort to engage in regional domination
let alone global domination. The four nations mentioned above are within the
sphere of influence of China.

It was the Japanese whose invasion and occupation of mainland
China
finally dislodged Imperial Great Britain. The Chinese republic established in
1912 was hard pressed to deal with the Japanese aggression in 1937 even with
the help of the United States
and Great Britain.
An aggressive China, as seen
during the Korean Conflict, could have mobilized the manpower needed to invest
one million men to invade Japan.
However, China did not have
the industrial base to launch any significant attack against Japan.

The Chinese cultural propensity towards tolerance is also
noticeable concerning the state of Taiwan. Taiwan
belongs to China, yet the
government of China in Beijing has allowed Taiwan a certain reluctant
independence since Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled Mao Zedong in 1949. The
Chinese intervention in the Korean Conflict was only due to U.N. forces sitting
on the Chinese-Korean border. The Chinese considered this intolerable and a precursor
to a larger war with the U.S and the West.

Korea,
being an exception and not the rule, one has to think that China will not willingly engage in
an attempted global coup. It does not seem, based on 2000 years of history, to
be their style. They might become more imperialistic should some stimulus force
a change, but it is hard to envision what that would be. China has not acted aggressively
even when invaded. They did fight the Japanese to a standstill, but did not
prosecute the war following the Japanese retreat. Since 1978, when they
privatized farms, to the present day, their economy has been steadily
strengthening. China
managed to survive the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis without much of an internal
crisis.

Today’s China,
Communist though it may be, is playing the U.S. game. They have even modified
their ideals to match the capitalist system.

Chinese
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on June 30, 1984 said:

Much of the talk in academia, politics, and “on the street”
concerns a shift in global domination from the U.S.
to Asia or to the E.U. However, based on
current cultural flow, it does not look like that is happening. As romantic a
notion as the global power shift heading back to the European Union may be, the
E,U is not positioning itself to take on global political domination. The
failure of to ratify the single European Union Constitution, and the painfully
slow and cautious addition of new countries into the EU, one might suspect they
are resisting their own unification. Whatever else one can say, they are indeed
being very careful about the process. Right now, they are quietly growing,
telling us we are full of ourselves, and doing everything they can to take over
the World Bank, thus taking control of the globalization process. Follow the
money, right?

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