| August 8, 2008, China, Russia put the world on notice | |
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| Aug 15, 2008 03:29 |   |
 | Hey, I have read an essay that dealt with the ongoing two hottest events: South Ossetia Crisis and Beijing Olympic Summer Games. The artilce was posted on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at Watchingtonpost.com. The author Harold Meyerson interpret the last Friday's two events from a broad and unique perspective. It is a very interesting article. I would like to share it with you guys. (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ The Drums of Change By Harold Meyerson Wednesday, August 13, 2008; Page A15 On or about last Friday, the world changed. With two very different coming-out parties -- the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and the invasion of Georgia -- China and Russia put everyone on notice that the power relationships of the past have been reshuffled and that formidable new powers are challenging the established order. I don't mean to equate Friday's two events, of course. The invasion of Georgia was a chilling display of Russia's brute force. The Olympics' opening ceremonies were a breathtaking display of China's wealth, power, creativity and vision, one that billions of viewers marveled at and enjoyed. Yet, it was the opening ceremonies, more than the Georgian invasion, that announced the greater challenge to democratic values. |
| Aug 15, 2008 03:31 | #1 |
| These events did not occur in a vacuum. Just a few weeks previous, global trade talks collapsed because China and India believed the proposed regulations would imperil their farmers. When these Doha Round deliberations began in 2001, it was inconceivable that they would be derailed by non-Western powers. By the summer of 2008, however, China and India had attained so much economic clout that they were perfectly capable of bringing the negotiations to a halt. The summer of '08, historians will most likely tell us, signaled the rise of a multi-power, non-Western-dominated planet. It also was the time when it became clear that the American Century would not lap over from the 20th into the 21st. Russia's invasion is surely the most shocking of these developments but also the least ground-breaking. It fits perfectly into that most ancient of great-power traditions -- asserting semi-sovereignty over its immediate neighbors. The United States even has a name for its right to intervene in its neighbors' affairs: the Monroe Doctrine. And just as Russia moved to undermine a militantly pro-American government on its borders, so the United States moved to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs and depose the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and green-lighted an attempted coup against Venezuela's Hugo Chávez in 2002. None of these interventions brought any credit to either the United States or Russia, but neither were they something new under the sun. Russia today is a mix of neo-czarist authoritarianism domestically and pan-Slavic belligerence internationally. Its clout resides not in its political beliefs and practices -- unlike Leninism, pan-Slavism is not likely to win any non-Slavic adherents -- or in its economic model but in its reserves of oil and natural gas, on which Europe in particular is dependent. It is not our proto-democratic buddy, but neither is it the kind of threat that requires ginning up the Cold War again, as John McCain and his neoconservative brethren seem to believe. |
| Aug 15, 2008 03:32 | #2 |
| China is something else again. If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou's opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin's 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit the fascist aesthetics of her film "Olympiad.") The subject of Zhang's ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China's harmonious relations with the rest of the world. Its masterstroke, however, wasn't its brilliant design but the decision, during the parade of the athletes, to have Chinese flag-bearer Yao Ming accompanied by an adorable 9-year-old boy who survived the recent catastrophic earthquake that killed many of his classmates, and who returned, after he had extricated himself from the rubble, to save two of his classmates. When asked why he went back, the NBC broadcaster told us, the boy said that he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates. That answer may tell us more than we want to know. He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy. For all we know, he might well have gone back even if he weren't a hall monitor, but his answer -- whether spontaneously his own or one that some responsible grown-up concocted for him -- works brilliantly as an advertisement for an authoritarian power bent on convincing the world that its social and political model is as benign as any democracy's. What Russia did last Friday was appalling, but it ultimately poses no systematic challenge to the world's democracies. What China did last Friday was entrancing, but its cuddly capitalist-Leninism, already much beloved by our major banks and corporations for its low-wage efficiency, poses a genuine economic challenge to the messier, unsynchronized workings of democracies. A nation that can assemble 2,000 perfectly synchronized drummers has clearly staked its claim as the world's assembly line. |
| Aug 15, 2008 09:29 | #3 |
| (((August 8, 2008, China, Russia put the world on notice))) With Russians as next-door neighbors, China, most get the message. Russia wants to be a dominant player on the neighborhood where not so long ago they used to call their turf. For those boys on their twenties, I beseech them to read the previous page in the book of Chinese history, only some two, three decades ago; China was a poverty-stricken nation, under the umbrella of an alliance with the defund and destroy Soviet Union of yesterday. After many decades of close relationship with the Soviet Union, with no benefit to the Chinese people, Chinas fortune was changed the day China set in motion the famous well known “under the table” relationship with America. Remember Kissinger, remember Nixon? No, you cannot. One of the most forceful and convincing hits of the cold war times to the desires of world dominance of the soviets; was the peaceful liberation of the Chinese people, by the Chinese economical alliance to the USA. “Almost forgot it, India is there.” About the Olympics, who remembers Mexico, LA, Moscow, Munich except as a place in the history concerning the Olympics that happen to happen loooooooooong time ago, that’s all. Twenty years from now, What twenty years old will care about Beijing Olympics more than we care about the 1968 Mexico City’s Olympics? Except that, according to history, Mexico City was one of the most, environmentally contaminate cities in the planet for the athletes and the games. Jcnile. |
| Aug 17, 2008 21:26 | #4 |
| Thanks for sharing the essay. I am puzzled with Jcnile's comment.What do you want to say when you mentioned Mexico, LA, Moscow, Munich, Jcnile? |
| Sep 4, 2008 23:27 | #5 |
| GUESTAPO | Chinese in China and overseas-born Chinese respect their Confucian values; one of them being respect for law & order for the greater good of society. I wholeheartedly agree and support the 'authoritarian' (the West's favorite description of governments who do not accept Western-style democracy) Government of the People Republic of China, the Government of Singapore (80% overseas-born Chinese) in maintaining law & order and foster harmony for the good of the majority. I expect China and Russia to counter America's aggression as much as possible anywhere in the world. It is time to stop the US and NATO countries from futher expansion and China and Russia can and must do it. |
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