August 29, 2011

In the early days of television, when I was teaching in New York City, I was asked to audition for a show on television that would focus on the teaching of geography. I chose the topic, “China, The Sleeping Giant.”

China was always as an incredible country for its size and the number of people who lived there. After a long period as the most advanced country in the world, lt’s dependence on Confucius philosophy pushed its’ focus inward and despised interaction with the outside world, creating a very poor and rural society. It was ravaged in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by western countries that had spheres of influence and their own enclave within Chinese territory. In the 20th Century, Japan invaded the country and murdered and enslaved its people. After the defeat of the Japanese, the Chinese communists defeated a corrupt nationalist government and proceeded to maintain a poor and subjugated population. China still slept.

Even so, everyone always realized that should China change its policies, given its population and resources, she would be a nation to compete on a grand scale with the rest of the world. Well that time has come and there are those, even in the United States, who fear that our time is over and that this is the Chinese Century. How wrong they are.