i am reading the hard-work but rewarding A History of Western Philosophy by the amazingly learned lord bertrand russell. this passage struck a nerve (emphasis mine):

Our use of the phrase the "Dark Ages" to cover a period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang Dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in may other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished... ...No one could have guessed that Western Europe would later become dominant, both in power and in culture...

Our superiority since the Renaissance is due partly to science and scientific technique, partly to political institutions slowly built up during the Middle Ages. There is no reason, in the nature of things, why this superiority should continue. In the present war, great military strength has been shown by Russia, China and Japan. All these combine Western technique with Eastern ideology- Byzantine, Confucian, or Shinto. India, if liberated, will contribute another Oriental element. It seems not unlikely that, during the next few centuries, civilization, if it survives, will have greater diversity than it has had since the Renaissance. There is an imperialism of culture which is harder to overcome than the imperialism of power. Long after the Western Empire fell- indeed until the Reformation- all European culture retained a tincture of Roman imperialism. It now has, for us, a West-European imperialistic flavour. I think that, if we are to feel at home in the world after the present war, we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes this will bring about, I do not know, but I am convinced that they will be profound and of the greatest importance.

napolean once said "let china sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world".

my personal china awakening (late to the party as usual) happened on my first trip to shanghai last year where I celebrated my thirtieth with some close friends. walking down the pedestrian section of nanjing road, i looked around and it suddenly seemed to me that if the rest of the world had perished in that instant, china might not even noticing. (it was a feeling rather than a thought). i have barely stopped thinking about china since.
i spent july living in beijing's haidian student district on an introductory mandarin course and then joined John Shoaf's pre-MBA Columbia World Tour in Shanghai. living in china for a few years is firmly on my life game plan map, in the meantime i am trying to learn more about the place.

james kynge, former china bureau chief of best newspaper in the world (The Financial Times), won the FT / Goldman Sachs business book of the year award in 1996 with 'china shakes the world' which is a superb, concise introduction to how and why china is shaping our world.
the first half tells the condensed history of china's post-cultural revolution rise and illuminates its leading position during much of the last six thousand years.
the book starts off recounting the mysterious disappearance of manhole covers all over the world (with plenty of reports of unsuspecting pedestrians falling into the suddenly-there holes from mongolia to montreal) as a signal of when the direction of the world - china relationship switched: the view of china flipped from how the outside world was changing china to how china was affecting the rest of the world. china's voracious appetite for almost every conceivable resource including the scrap metal that those manholes were destined to become was just one signal that the causal direction was switching.
james has plenty of engaging first-hand accounts from his two decades living in china through which it often seems we are witnessing china's economic transformation unfold through his eyes.

some of the major themes / ideas that run throughout include:

• businesses everywhere are finding it harder to compete (manufacturers in particular), the sustainability of europe's welfare state model is in question as the industrial base there is hollowed out.
• china out-competes and out-capitalizes everyone, especially america.
• chinese possess the impressive combo of intelligence and second-to-none work ethic.
• china through lowering the cost of goods and its insatiable appetite for us treasuries (in part to manage its currency) has fueled the low-iinterest rate driven housing boom and general drive for yield that has resulted in the current sub-prime, credit-crunch, free-fall dollar mess we're in. 
• 400 million people have been lifted above the poverty line over the last 28 years of above 9.5% economic growth.

a could be briefer! summary of some of the book's chapters:

rags to riches.
kynge recasts the economic revolution that started with deng xiapong's (who famously said "to be rich is glorious") reign (after the madness that was mao's cultural revolution) as one based on the creative disobedience of china's local governments rather than the top-down implementation of a genius xiapong vision (which is closer to the official line). deng's genius lay in his strategy of running with whatever seemed to be working (i.e. creating jobs). we follow china in the 80s and 90s as it takes the initial steps towards becoming the world's workshop. it's a time characterized by an impressively enterprising private sector scrambling through post-communist bureaucractic loopholes, aided by subsidized capital, power and water.
those who 'got rich first' were often the unemployed or unemployable (who had no choice but to become entrepreneurs) which made for some surprising characters filling china's rich list lists a few decades later (former convicts, peasants, etc).
 
the future is the past.
kynge attacks the historical determinism widely prevalent in today's china that its superpower status is inevitable; after all the country has laid claim to that mantle for much of the last few thousand years.
he questions whether china's status truly was as strong as is often claimed. he opines that the tang dynasty (800AD) was the country's peak (and not unrelated, also its most open period) and that china had been in a state of relative, per capita decline through the end of the cultural revolution.  

most of the chapter takes place in chongqing (once called chungking), the contemporary equivalent of chicago circa 19th century; twain wrote "...astonishing Chicago, a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time". hg wells wrote of an "unwholesome reek", "a dark smear in the sky", he found it "one hoarse cry for discipline".

china is following the path trodden by america in the 19th century, or japan post-1950, but the sheer scale and speed of its trajectory puts it in a class of its own.
kynge talks about the 'compression of developmental time' when describing the unrivaled urbanization taking place. and with 700 million still living on less than 2$ a day, it can still count on pre-industrial revolution wages to maintain its competitive edge for the forseeable future.
linteresting, china studies much from america's own rise, and models its highways, railroads, infrastructure on the us (learning from its mistakes of course and leap-frogging straight to the 21st century).
this is the magic of china - it is replaying out the birth of a great american nation but on a scale that dwarfs it.

population paradox.

• kynge discusses how the lure of a billion person market often masks a highly fragmented and obliquely protected domestic market, but the foreign investments continue regardless.
  
• numbers hold a special, magical place in chinese culture (as we witnessed with 8.08pm opening ceremony on 080808).
• china takes a super-long-term approach to things: ZhouEnlai, Mao's premier, when asked whether the French Revolution had been a success, replied without irony that it was too early to tell..
• china may grow old before it grows rich (thanks to the draconian one-child policy).
• its famous lack of respect for intellectual property.
• many chinese ventures are unprofitable and propped up by state banks (the state prioritizes jobs over profits, and china's high savings means there's is plenty of liquidity).
  

china goes to europe.
james visits several cities in europe to see first hand the crippling changes that china's matchless competitiveness has wrought on the crumbling european industrial hinterland (steel mills in germany, clothing factories in italy etc).
if prato, a city that has been at the center of the global fashion textiles industry since the medici's, is unable to stand up to the chinese competition that starts with manufacturing and works its way up the value chain, in time buying brands, technology and skills, what does that say for the rest of europe and its welfare state so painstakingly put together after world war ii?

america bought and sold.
takes us to average america to show first-hand how the country's middle is being hollowed out (middle class, middle america, mid-sized businesses) and sets the scene for a possible future where the politically critical middle class turn against further globalization. the key idea here is that china started out at the bottom of the global value chain - manufacturing - but is moving higher and higher up much faster than a lot of people realize. although china is spending more and more on r&d, it still significantly lags the us on this front, but it is increasingly simply buying its way up the value chain (buying brands and the ip of companies bankrupted by china's competitiveness).

not enough to go around.
the mismatch of resources (in part due to china's inefficient, wasteful use of its geological assets) and the size of its population has meant the environment has been an incontestable loser of china's magnificent rise. but as kynge notes in the book's final pages when tempering the possibility of a military clash between the US and china, pragmatism usually wins over at least in the short-term in china and as the environmental costs to china continue to be felt, action will probably be taken. in deed the SEPA profile seems to have risen noticeably since the book was published.

we also learn about the CNOOC v congress battle, and that the commodities boom kicked off when China joined the WTO - probably not coincidentally. also, the yangtze river is running dry!

corruption and inefficiency are to blame for a lot of this (as well as a philosophical disrespect for nature).
 
collapse of social trust.
china has a rich philosophical history (we learn about the concept of ren- roughly benevolence) but as mencius said in his bull mounatin parable (on ren, human goodness):

"The Bull Mountain was once covered with lively trees.  But it is near the capital of a great State. People came with their axes and choppers; they cut the woods down, and the mountain has lost its beauty.  Yet even so, the day air and the night air came to it, rain and dew moistened it till here and there fresh sprouts began to grow.  But soon cattle and sheep came along and browsed on them, and in the end the mountain became gaunt and bare, as it is now.  And seeing it thus gaunt and bare, people imagine that it was woodless from the start."

social trust is being eroded at an alarming rate, evident in

• news with bonus (pr companies customarily bribe journalists to print stories).
• the emergence of 100,000s of private detectives a job that did not exist just over a decade ago.
• state corruption has lead to HIV infecting one million peasants and orphaned 100,000 children.
  

communism vs democracy.
kynge: "the main problem with china's political systen is that it does not permit the checks and balances necessary to supervise and regulate a capitalist society"

some personal thoughts: i believe in democratic in principle (checks and balances, efficiency, accountability, etc, legitimacy), but apart from police and military states that rule completely by fear and intimidation (saddam's iraq, iran, egypt, etc) there is an invisible social contract between party and people in non-democracries.
the lack of legitimacy conferred by elections if anything drives regimes like china, singapore and the uae to work especially hard to appease their populaces (and you can't help but be impressed with these systems' efficiency- beijing's pre-olympic transformation could only have happened in this context, india would fail given twice as long).
on balance, the loss of efficiency inherent in democracy is a worthwhile sacrifice in my opinion, but it needs renewal i think.

can we be friends?
'waishi' or foreign affairs in china often blurs the boundaries between friendship of individuals and that of states when it comes to achieving goals.
chinese schoolbooks teach that the 109 years leading up to the cultural revolution involved attackis and fireign meddling by the US, Japan, Russia, Britain and France without distinguishing between then and now (this will be unsurprising to anyone who grew up in the Middle East where the West, US, and Israel are given similar treatment) which is obviously unhelpful in building sincere fruitful relationships with foreigners.

the state uses nationalism and its ability in returning international respect and prestige to china to build its legitimacy amongst its people. but this brooding, sub-surface xenophobia is difficult to control (evidenced in the street's reactions to the US bombing of the chinese embassy in belgrade or the recurrent anti-Japanese demonstrations)

we are entering a new era of international politics defined by the geopolitics of scarcity, kynge outlines a very real possible scenario of heightened military showdowns between the US and China but ends the book on a more hopeful note extolling China's pragmatism (at least in the short-term) as a characteristic that could lead to the unprecedented peaceful rise of a superpower.

my (more worriesome) thoughts on this at the moment are that key differences between the japan and german post ww-ii rises including:

• the commitment to china's (played down) military build-up.
  
• size!
• sustained domestic pressure to grow (they need 24 million jobs a year, and must feed the increasingly rich and decreasingly agrarian population).

and china's is just as xenophobic as everyone else it unfortunately.

a must read for anyone remotely interested in what our future will look like.

i picked up jia zhang-ke's haunting still life at the local uibe neighborhood dvd store. the university's relatively high quotient of richer-than-average foreign students meant that the surrounding stores and restaurants were a little more refined than in wudaoko (where my dorms were) and i spent a lot of time there as most of my classes were at the uibe. like others in beijing, the totally legit-looking dvd store sells a mix of legit and mainly too cheap to be legit dvds, but in this hood where the local cafe is called sculpting in time the store had a really excellent selection of international and art-housey fare which was perfectly convenient for picking up a film on my way home on a stormy rainy beijing night (pyro pizza and yanjing pijiu being the other two key elements of a good night in).

still life is one of those haunting, deeply touching films where seemingly not much happens but the film's spaces and sentiments resonate in you for days.

two out of towners come to fengjie in search of their spouses. han is a principled coalminer from shanxi (the countryside that is printed on 50RMB notes) whose bought wife (3,000 RNB back then) ran off 16 years ago, he comes to see his daughter but ends up reconnecting with his ex-wife and commits to saving her from a life of drudgery and debt. shen is a nurse whose husband moved to fengjie to work on the three gorges dam and who has since been seduced by money power and perhaps his co-worker too. she tracks him down, they tango with the massive, imposing, nature destroying, yet ultimately beautiful in glorious hd, dam in the distance and then she asks for a divorce explaining curtly that she's in love with another man who she is moving to shanghai with.

the tamed river is about the only thing that is still in fengjie, a 2,000 year old village destroyed in 2 years (of course there are going to be problems! complains one of the party worker's in a scene facing unresolved compensation claims) to make way for one of the greatest human engineering feats ever built (6 times as long and 8 times as powerfu as the hoover dam - kynge). the only people not moving away or being moved around to make way for the next phase of the dam seem to be those involved in demolishing the next tranche of buildings to make way for the impending higher water levels (han's original home is already submerged under the green yangtze).

'life happens to you' is a theme that cropped up time and time again when i was in china and the characters in still life generally just get on with things. wake up to party members painting a 'demolish' sign on your home? kick up a nominal fuss but the decision is simply do i move to the decidedly worse off compensated housing or pick up my things and move to another town? the tone throughout is contemplative, forlorn and at a loss.

the scale of change in china is so super human that all the players (coalminer to made business/party-man) are but tiny specks, inconsequential pawns of hyper-capitalism's invisible but far from unfelt hands. there's something equally frightening and glorious about it all as there is about lik wai yu's rich slow pans of the dam and super-engineered bridge that lights up the whole sky when switched on at night. the otherwise strange phenomena of magically appearing tight-rope walkers, ufo's and beautifully ruptured almost bauhausian modernist building lifting off space-shuttle-like can be almost be ordinary in this context.

a magnificent, devestatingly poignant film.

so every sixapart powered blog in the world lies on the wrong side of the depressingly effective great firewall of china (aka the world's biggest internet market, and still growing at 50%!) which should be keeping anil up at night. blogger, wordpress et al. and chinese competition are cleaning up in what is of course one of the world's liveliest blogging scenes.

so what would you do if, out of nowhere, you suddenly had 12 months to fill? a theoretical godsend or shamefully nightmarish!?

• train to be a scuba diving instructor and follow the sun beach to beach
  
• move to beijing and blag a job writing for the beijinger
  
• start that music label you know is in you
• build that beach house in zanzibar (PADI on the side?)
• culinary school
• watch 365 movies, read 24 books, write 190,000 words
  
• tennis camp
• find something to do in calcutta
• make short-form documentaries
  
• run 12 marathons
• snowboard instructor
• yoga ashram
• live africa, traveling to each country on the continent

filling in the gap: