本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Op-Ed Columnist
China’s Rise Goes Beyond Gold Medals
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
China is on track to displace the United States as the winner of the most Olympic gold medals this year. Get used to it.
Today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education.
The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas — meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi.
But then China and India both began to fall apart at just the time that Europe began to rise. China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.
Now the world is reverting to its normal state — a powerful Asia — and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as “turtle’s eggs.”
During the rise of the West, Chinese culture constantly had to adapt. When the first Westerners arrived and brought their faith in the Virgin Mary, China didn’t have an equivalent female figure to work miracles — so Guan Yin, the God of Mercy, underwent a sex change and became the Goddess of Mercy.
Now it will be our turn to scramble to compete with a rising Asia.
This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community, made more so by China’s prickly nationalism. China still sees the world through the prism of guochi, or national humiliation, and among some young Chinese success sometimes seems to have produced not so much national self-confidence as cockiness.
China’s intelligence agencies are becoming more aggressive in targeting America, including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence. These include space weapons, cyberwarfare and technologies to threaten American aircraft carrier groups.
President Bush was roundly criticized for attending the Beijing Olympics, but, in retrospect, I think he was right to attend. The most important bilateral relationship in the world in the coming years will be the one between China and the United States, and Mr. Bush won enormous good will from the Chinese people by showing up.
Having won that political capital, though, Mr. Bush didn’t spend it. Mr. Bush should have spoken out more forcefully on behalf of human rights, including urging Beijing to stop shipping the weapons used for genocide in Darfur.
It’s a difficult balance to get right, but China’s determination to top the gold medal charts — and its overwhelming efforts to find and train the best athletes — bespeaks a larger desire for international respect and legitimacy. We can use that desire also to shame and coax better behavior out of China’s leaders.
When the Chinese government sentences two frail women in their late 70s to labor camp because they applied to hold a legal protest during the Olympics, as it just has, then that is an outrage to be addressed not by “silent diplomacy” but by pointing it out.
We also must recognize that informal pressures are becoming increasingly important. The most important figure in China-U.S. relations today isn’t the ambassador for either country; it is Yao Ming, the basketball player — and David Stern, the commissioner of the N.B.A., is second. The biggest force for democratization isn’t the Group of 7 governments, but is the millions of Chinese who study in the West and return — sometimes with green cards or blue passports, but always with greater expectations of freedom. China’s rise is sustained in part by the way the Communist Party has grudgingly, sometimes incompetently, adapted to these pressures for change.
On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.
Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.
That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.
中评社香港8月21日电（记者 岑岚编译报道）北京奥运会赛程已过大半，中国一路领先居金牌榜首，纵使美国“金牌”选手菲尔普斯独揽八金，纵使中国“翔飞人”因伤退赛，纽约时报今天发表纪思道（Nicholas D.Kristof）的评论文章指出，中国在本次奥运会金牌榜势将无出其右，得习惯、适应这种情势了。
文章说，如今，中国在运动赛事领域夺得耀眼成绩，未来，中国将在艺术、经济、科学以及教育方面取得同样惊人的进展。文章认为，我们目前所处的欧美主导的世界，从历史角度来说，是一个反常。直到十五世纪，世界上最大的经济体是中国和印度，然中、印在过去几个世纪欧洲崛起同时却开始衰落。当今世界正恢复其常态，我们将要适应一个影响力正在上升的亚洲。
对于美国总统布什参加北京奥运会开幕式，文章认为这是一个正确的选择。
文章指出，在未来，世界上最重要的双边关系是中美关系，布什总统出席奥运会赢得中国人民极大好感。现在中美关系中的最重要人物不是双方互派的大使，而是姚明和N.B.A.总裁戴维．斯特恩（David Stern）。文章认为，数以百万计的在西方留学和已经回到中国的人，将是中国民主发展的重要力量，中共也在尝试适应求变的诉求。
文章最后指出，变通正是中国伟大力量之一，亦是中国崛起的原因之一。中国崛起不仅体现在奥运会上，而是在几乎所有方面。
纪思道是《China Wakes》（中文书名：中国觉醒了）的作者之一，曾任纽约时报驻香港、北京首席记者。更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
China’s Rise Goes Beyond Gold Medals
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
China is on track to displace the United States as the winner of the most Olympic gold medals this year. Get used to it.
Today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education.
The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas — meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi.
But then China and India both began to fall apart at just the time that Europe began to rise. China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.
Now the world is reverting to its normal state — a powerful Asia — and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as “turtle’s eggs.”
During the rise of the West, Chinese culture constantly had to adapt. When the first Westerners arrived and brought their faith in the Virgin Mary, China didn’t have an equivalent female figure to work miracles — so Guan Yin, the God of Mercy, underwent a sex change and became the Goddess of Mercy.
Now it will be our turn to scramble to compete with a rising Asia.
This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community, made more so by China’s prickly nationalism. China still sees the world through the prism of guochi, or national humiliation, and among some young Chinese success sometimes seems to have produced not so much national self-confidence as cockiness.
China’s intelligence agencies are becoming more aggressive in targeting America, including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence. These include space weapons, cyberwarfare and technologies to threaten American aircraft carrier groups.
President Bush was roundly criticized for attending the Beijing Olympics, but, in retrospect, I think he was right to attend. The most important bilateral relationship in the world in the coming years will be the one between China and the United States, and Mr. Bush won enormous good will from the Chinese people by showing up.
Having won that political capital, though, Mr. Bush didn’t spend it. Mr. Bush should have spoken out more forcefully on behalf of human rights, including urging Beijing to stop shipping the weapons used for genocide in Darfur.
It’s a difficult balance to get right, but China’s determination to top the gold medal charts — and its overwhelming efforts to find and train the best athletes — bespeaks a larger desire for international respect and legitimacy. We can use that desire also to shame and coax better behavior out of China’s leaders.
When the Chinese government sentences two frail women in their late 70s to labor camp because they applied to hold a legal protest during the Olympics, as it just has, then that is an outrage to be addressed not by “silent diplomacy” but by pointing it out.
We also must recognize that informal pressures are becoming increasingly important. The most important figure in China-U.S. relations today isn’t the ambassador for either country; it is Yao Ming, the basketball player — and David Stern, the commissioner of the N.B.A., is second. The biggest force for democratization isn’t the Group of 7 governments, but is the millions of Chinese who study in the West and return — sometimes with green cards or blue passports, but always with greater expectations of freedom. China’s rise is sustained in part by the way the Communist Party has grudgingly, sometimes incompetently, adapted to these pressures for change.
On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.
Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.
That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.
中评社香港8月21日电（记者 岑岚编译报道）北京奥运会赛程已过大半，中国一路领先居金牌榜首，纵使美国“金牌”选手菲尔普斯独揽八金，纵使中国“翔飞人”因伤退赛，纽约时报今天发表纪思道（Nicholas D.Kristof）的评论文章指出，中国在本次奥运会金牌榜势将无出其右，得习惯、适应这种情势了。
文章说，如今，中国在运动赛事领域夺得耀眼成绩，未来，中国将在艺术、经济、科学以及教育方面取得同样惊人的进展。文章认为，我们目前所处的欧美主导的世界，从历史角度来说，是一个反常。直到十五世纪，世界上最大的经济体是中国和印度，然中、印在过去几个世纪欧洲崛起同时却开始衰落。当今世界正恢复其常态，我们将要适应一个影响力正在上升的亚洲。
对于美国总统布什参加北京奥运会开幕式，文章认为这是一个正确的选择。
文章指出，在未来，世界上最重要的双边关系是中美关系，布什总统出席奥运会赢得中国人民极大好感。现在中美关系中的最重要人物不是双方互派的大使，而是姚明和N.B.A.总裁戴维．斯特恩（David Stern）。文章认为，数以百万计的在西方留学和已经回到中国的人，将是中国民主发展的重要力量，中共也在尝试适应求变的诉求。
文章最后指出，变通正是中国伟大力量之一，亦是中国崛起的原因之一。中国崛起不仅体现在奥运会上，而是在几乎所有方面。
纪思道是《China Wakes》（中文书名：中国觉醒了）的作者之一，曾任纽约时报驻香港、北京首席记者。更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net