本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛"We're (not) No. 1!"
By Kevin Horrigan
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/18/2008
Since Monday's horrible earthquake in southwest China, the TV has been showing pictures of the rescue and recovery effort. For the first couple of days, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with this picture.
Guys in blue jumpsuits and hard hats using heavy equipment to dig through rubble. Battalions of army troops in camo fatigues marching resolutely into action. Trucks, cranes, earthmovers, klieg lights, even politicians with bullhorns standing on rubble piles.
Then it hit me: They were getting it done. The Chinese were getting it done. There are still bodies buried under rubble and dams with big cracks in them, and as many as 50,000 people may be dead. Offers of international aid, as they say, are pouring in, but for the most part, the Chinese are getting it done by themselves.
Thirty-two years ago, when a major earthquake killed 240,000 in China, the rescue and recovery efforts were a catastrophe. There was no organized rescue, no heavy equipment, not even many pictures or news reports escaping into the West. China was closed, paranoid and inept.
Things have changed.
Now the question for the United States is whether we should celebrate that fact or worry about it.
Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, argues in his new book, "The Post-American World," that China's ascendance — as well as that of India and other nations once categorized as "developing" — is a good thing.
Not only did the United States win the Cold War, but its market system also won the economic war, and its values system is winning the cultural war:
"For 60 years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics and embrace trade and technology," Zakaria writes."We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism."
But victory has come with several prices, one of them being $4 a gallon. Americans have cars and trucks, and people in China, India and Brazil — and 180 other nations — want them, too. They also want refrigerators and air-conditioning and other energy-reliant technologies. Demand goes up, and so do prices.
This feeling of displacement — and how we deal with it — is a major issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. For more than 30 years, Americans have seen their jobs moving overseas as the labor market became an international entity. This year, Toyota surpassed General Motors as the world's most prolific automaker. They took our cars, they took our jobs and now they're taking our gasoline.
Some victory.
Worse, they're taking our technology and using it against us. We gave the world the microprocessor, and what does the world do? It uses garage-door openers to trigger bombs that kill the troops we send to liberate them.
No wonder Americans feel displaced. The whole Iraq war was based on the neoconservative premise that the world's sole remaining superpower could accelerate freedom with the use of muscular, unilateral action.
But asymmetrical warfare (one leftover artillery round plus one garage-door opener vs. one $150,000 Humvee = four dead American soldiers) means muscle ain't what it used to be. Unilateral doesn't work in a multilateral world.
Which brings us back to China. Sometime in the late 2020s, China's economy may surpass that of the United States as the largest in the world. As Zakaria notes, economic power breeds nationalism, and with nationalism comes the urge to throw your weight around. He is sanguine about this, arguing that nations with intertwined economies are not likely to lob missiles at each other.
But others, including Mark Helprin, novelist and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank, say that the proper response to China is to spend more on the U.S. military. In an oped piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, Helprin argued that if the United States is not to be at China's mercy, we must build more fighter planes, more aircraft carriers, more of everything.
This school of thought has a lot of adherents within the Pentagon. Others, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly-appointed head of the U.S. Central Command, argue that a bigger threat are small-scale wars fought with non-traditional weapons and counter-insurgency troops.
With their very competence, those blue-suited Chinese rescue workers are sending a message that the world has turned upside down. Bob Gates and David Petraeus now are liberals, so to speak. Americans are left with the choice of buying $100 worth of gas and subsidizing the Arab world or buying a big-screen TV and expanding the Chinese economy. We can cut consumption and learn to love it, or we can pay higher taxes to fund our lifestyle, increase our foreign debt and build a China-proof military.
Who would have thought we'd miss the calm, reassuring presence of the Soviet Union?更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
By Kevin Horrigan
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/18/2008
Since Monday's horrible earthquake in southwest China, the TV has been showing pictures of the rescue and recovery effort. For the first couple of days, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with this picture.
Guys in blue jumpsuits and hard hats using heavy equipment to dig through rubble. Battalions of army troops in camo fatigues marching resolutely into action. Trucks, cranes, earthmovers, klieg lights, even politicians with bullhorns standing on rubble piles.
Then it hit me: They were getting it done. The Chinese were getting it done. There are still bodies buried under rubble and dams with big cracks in them, and as many as 50,000 people may be dead. Offers of international aid, as they say, are pouring in, but for the most part, the Chinese are getting it done by themselves.
Thirty-two years ago, when a major earthquake killed 240,000 in China, the rescue and recovery efforts were a catastrophe. There was no organized rescue, no heavy equipment, not even many pictures or news reports escaping into the West. China was closed, paranoid and inept.
Things have changed.
Now the question for the United States is whether we should celebrate that fact or worry about it.
Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, argues in his new book, "The Post-American World," that China's ascendance — as well as that of India and other nations once categorized as "developing" — is a good thing.
Not only did the United States win the Cold War, but its market system also won the economic war, and its values system is winning the cultural war:
"For 60 years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics and embrace trade and technology," Zakaria writes."We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism."
But victory has come with several prices, one of them being $4 a gallon. Americans have cars and trucks, and people in China, India and Brazil — and 180 other nations — want them, too. They also want refrigerators and air-conditioning and other energy-reliant technologies. Demand goes up, and so do prices.
This feeling of displacement — and how we deal with it — is a major issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. For more than 30 years, Americans have seen their jobs moving overseas as the labor market became an international entity. This year, Toyota surpassed General Motors as the world's most prolific automaker. They took our cars, they took our jobs and now they're taking our gasoline.
Some victory.
Worse, they're taking our technology and using it against us. We gave the world the microprocessor, and what does the world do? It uses garage-door openers to trigger bombs that kill the troops we send to liberate them.
No wonder Americans feel displaced. The whole Iraq war was based on the neoconservative premise that the world's sole remaining superpower could accelerate freedom with the use of muscular, unilateral action.
But asymmetrical warfare (one leftover artillery round plus one garage-door opener vs. one $150,000 Humvee = four dead American soldiers) means muscle ain't what it used to be. Unilateral doesn't work in a multilateral world.
Which brings us back to China. Sometime in the late 2020s, China's economy may surpass that of the United States as the largest in the world. As Zakaria notes, economic power breeds nationalism, and with nationalism comes the urge to throw your weight around. He is sanguine about this, arguing that nations with intertwined economies are not likely to lob missiles at each other.
But others, including Mark Helprin, novelist and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank, say that the proper response to China is to spend more on the U.S. military. In an oped piece in The Wall Street Journal last week, Helprin argued that if the United States is not to be at China's mercy, we must build more fighter planes, more aircraft carriers, more of everything.
This school of thought has a lot of adherents within the Pentagon. Others, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the newly-appointed head of the U.S. Central Command, argue that a bigger threat are small-scale wars fought with non-traditional weapons and counter-insurgency troops.
With their very competence, those blue-suited Chinese rescue workers are sending a message that the world has turned upside down. Bob Gates and David Petraeus now are liberals, so to speak. Americans are left with the choice of buying $100 worth of gas and subsidizing the Arab world or buying a big-screen TV and expanding the Chinese economy. We can cut consumption and learn to love it, or we can pay higher taxes to fund our lifestyle, increase our foreign debt and build a China-proof military.
Who would have thought we'd miss the calm, reassuring presence of the Soviet Union?更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net