Marking 60 years: China leaps from 19th to 21st century

[SoCalDem]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/74959.html


This is a FANTASTIC article on China.. please take the time to read it all. It's a harbinger of what will vex us for a very long time..maybe forever.;.. yet who can blame the Chinese people for wanting modernity?
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* Posted on Sunday, September 6, 2009
Marking 60 years: China leaps from 19th to 21st century

By David Klepper | Kansas City Star

BEIJING — The van careens through busy streets, blurring the crowds, the neon and the oversized buildings of this capital city. Allen Fan, a Hong Konger turned Beijing entrepreneur, sits in back and recalls the way things used to be. When Fan arrived nearly 30 years ago, cars were scarce. Visitors had to apply to a government ministry to use a public phone. The extended weather forecast was a state secret.

“Those days, all you saw was opportunity,” Fan recalls.

His businesses include data storage and a moving company, though today it’s his restaurants and an upcoming yacht race that fire his imagination. The van veers into the vehicular and pedestrian knot of historic Tiananmen Square. A portrait of Mao Zedong towers above the chaos and clicking of digital cameras. Traffic thins and Mao’s image recedes as the van passes a strip of shops and high-rise offices. Fan points to a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop. “Now everything’s changed,” he says. “If you’re not doing business in China, you’re missing out on the biggest market in the world.”

Next month, the People’s Republic of China turns 60. Mao, resting in his tomb in Tiananmen, wouldn’t recognize it. The most rapid modernization in history has turned the “Weak Man of Asia” into an economic darling with the world’s largest auto market and the most Internet users. Much has been written in recent years about China’s rapid transformation into an economic behemoth. But to the first-time visitor, it’s still astonishing. “They went to school on the rest of the world, to learn how to do business,” said Craig McMonigle, vice president for global procurement at Hallmark Cards.

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With that growth, however, come challenges. An unslakable thirst for energy. The most polluted cities on Earth. Legal and political systems that lag behind economic reform. And more than 700 million who still wait for globalization in the nation’s rural expanse. Still, who could have predicted that China could jump from the 19th century straight to the 21st in just 60 years? “The country was devastated by civil war, by war with the Japanese,” said C.H. Tung, a former Hong Kong chief executive who led the former British colony after its handover to China. “From the ashes, China rebuilt. That was in 1949. Think about it. What China has done in 60 years. It’s like a miracle.”

How do they do it?

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[madrchsod]

1. unrestricted access to the largest consumer nation in the world

the unrestricted ability under under cut the price of any us made product from basic steel to children's toys. last but not least the us based corporations with the help of our political leadership sold their trademarks or moved to china.

we exported labor costs and products to china and we are reaping the whirlwind.