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Nicholas D. Kristof

International Herald Tribune

Beyond gold medals

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Published: August 21, 2008

BEIJING: China is on track to displace the U.S. 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 Westerners 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 the West’s 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 the U.S., including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/21/opinion/edkristof.php