WonTon With That....

What a difference a few years make.

It wasn’t too many years ago, that 500 million Chinese got up in the morning to listen to the English language broadcast of the BBC.

Americans talked about how big a market China would be for American products.

This was fifteen years ago when China was still considered as so much putty to be manipulated by the west.

But surprise, surprise, it didn’t work out that way.

China will not be the state that will be manipulated but the manipulator.
This is clear from America’s monthly trade balances and the fact that we, ourselves, the Super Power in economic terms qualify as a third world nation exporting agricultural products and our scrap and importing finished goods.

So, it was not quite unreasonable to read that in Palo Alto where most of America’s recent technology was born or spurred on, the town fathers are considering the introduction of Mandarin in the public schools.

Part of this has to do with the fact that 17% of the population is Asian; but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Even the American populations there understand that China is going to play an even bigger role in the future and it would be a good idea to learn the language of the world’s largest population and what is often not said, leading population.

For it is hard to deny that China wins every contest it is engaged in. The Koreans understand this viscerally and when they heard that they were targeting the luxury ship building industry, the Koreans quickly decided that it was time to get out and find another industry than try to compete with them…

For the time being, Mandarin Chinese will not be taught in the public schools of Palo Alto but that does not mean that it won’t be next year or the year after.

Already, other cities are considering it and San Francisco and Cupertino are already moving ahead with their Chinese programs in high gear. And perhaps that may not be a year too soon.

It was unwise but not totally out of character for the president of GM to sniffle at China’s scanty exhibit in Detroit. Within the next few years, China will make Detroit eat their words when they introduce a range of cars that will dazzle American consumers. And it is predicted that within ten years, China will be a major competitor on the world automotive stage.

While many inside the Beltway and elsewhere continue to underplay China’s growing world role, insiders secretly acknowledge that a country that can turn out ten times the number of engineers we graduate, is a force to be reckoned with.

And any country that can build 121 cities with over a million population, most of them built in the last twenty years, is a country to be taken seriously.

Les Aaron