The Industrialists of China have found themselves in a position similar to the one in which United States of American Industrialists found themselves after WWII; they have nearly uncontested control of key industries. And like the USA, they have been shouldered with the hopes and dreams of their people’s future.
Like the USA in the 1950s, and like China in the 2020s, it seems that the “hopes and dreams” of the people will too often become the “imperatives of national strategy.”
And back in the 1950s, the Commies in China and Russia talked a lot of utter bullshit, but they did try to warn us about the dangers of letting of our national strategy trump the hopes and dreams of the people that actually put drill bit to steel and built the country. If we could have understood Chinese or Russian, we might have at least considered their warnings. But other than a few spooks at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, very few of us understood Chinese or Russian. Yeah, we heard and saw the same messages translated poorly into English, but they didn’t use words that carried any level of truth for us, so we ignored those. Had we could have shared some time with Ai Weiwei, we might have seen the truth. But in reality, the people of the 1950s were just as much an epic collection of dumb-asses as we are today. They sucked up disinformation like it was the super-concentrated Slurm that Fry was unable to extricate himself.
I suspect though, that had we actually spent some time with these people, we could have sifted the useful from the debris. But it was barely an option in the 1950s, perhaps by design, other than becoming a soldier or buying a diplomacy, there weren’t too many ways that a regular person could rub shoulders with these “Commies” that could have us lose our jobs, lose our friends, even lose our families. That’s a real fear that a lot of young people today have no real knowledge.
Those of you who know Rocksteady Eddy might have seen his YouTube video where he told his friends what happened when he had visited his extended family for a Fourth of July Picnic, they were all gathered around a beautiful red, white and blue picnic table out in the back pasture, family all around. And Eddy says “it was like a fucking Norman Rockwell painting, I shit you not.” I have to paraphrase a bit here, without actually pulling up the video, so I’ll do my best …
“I spent an hour or so talking to all my extended family, I see these folks once-a-year. It’s the 1950s, even the women seem to have businesses, and some do college or teach, all the men have big projects, everything from commissioning an aircraft carrier, to doing rocket design, industrializing an old family ranch up in Wyoming, good for a hundred thousand acres.” I’m paraphrasing all of this, but I’m trying to save the gist of the story here from Eddy, because it actually happened to him.
“So we all sit down at the table, I didn’t see one damn fly or even a mosquito, they must have soot potted the perimeter of the field, but I didn’t smell anything other than clean, mountain air. We’re all passing around these big plates of corn, even bigger plates of watermelon slices, potato salad, hot dogs, burgers, big jugs of pink lemonade. We’re all talking and everyone has a lot of fun. Then my Uncle Andy, it’s his ranch, he bellows over at me, ‘Edward, what’s this I hear about you going to China?’ So I tell him about my job, and then somehow I mentioned that due to a pipeline commission treaty between the Soviets and the Chinese, that our crew drove up to the border, filed our paperwork and drove up in Siberia and ultimately all the way into St. Petersburgh. I hadn’t wanted to mention it, but that road trip was the highlight of my career … we actually drove a convoy of geologic and pipeline inspection equipment through China and into Russia. To my knowledge it had never been done, and I was damned proud of it.”
I’ll continue his story to the best of my memory …
“Uncle Andy sets his eyeballs on me, and then it looked like something just snapped in him, the thin thread to held him anchored to the ground in the hurricane that was the inside of his head, it just snapped. And then he let loose on me asking me what I was thinking bringing my ‘Commie ideas’ onto my damned ranch?’ He’s foaming at the mouth by the this point, and I mean that literally, in that cavalcade of emotional collapse, I saw a little bit of white foam in the corner of his mouth, probably saliva that frothed up from the heat boiling off his body. At that point, I realized it was time for me to get the hell out of Dodge, Uncle Andy could have killed me with his bare hands just to save twelve-cents on a bullet.”
End of story. That was the reality of life back in the 1950s, you had to show the world that you hated Commies, or you would lose business contracts left, right and center.
We wouldn’t have been able to parse the wisdom from the propaganda even if we had the means and the will … fear will kick the shit out of means and will five ways to Sunday. Had we been able to parse that message and then adapt it to our own lives, we might have saved tens of millions of lives lost to that fear; children blown to bits or starved to death for the crime of not having the good fortune to have been born at the steps of a Norman Rockwell fantasy.
We didn’t learn until we finally priced ourselves out of the market.
So now China is in the position that we once did inhabit. The wealth from the Chinese Economic Juggernaut will not see a significant competitor for at least the next half-decade or so, if not longer, and the only real talent on the bench right now is Central America, which is currently in the process of working to protect their natural and cultural resources in a profound way, as part of their skyrocketing economy. The Tribes of Azteca and Inca seem well-positioned to someday assume the cursed cloak from China, and they will be better positioned than any culture in modern history to become wealthy without destroying their natural and cultural treasures. But for now, it’s China.
China has apparently decided that they no longer want to destroy their natural and cultural heritage to obtain their wealth. So they increasingly outsource their wealth production to Africa. And now, we need to warn them. We are still as linguistically limited as we were back in the 1950s, but the China understands us in a way that we could not understand them.
China sees Africa as a place of great cultural and natural wealth. And they are correct. China is a place of great cultural and natural wealth. But what China does not see in Africa, is their home. That has to change. If a Chinese-African loves his or her new home in Africa, then they need to protect that cultural and natural wealth in a way that the USA never did when we ran a commercial steamroller over the beauties and quirks of Europe after WWII. It took the Europeans a couple of decades to reclaim their histories from the Coca-Cola Levis Starbucks McDonaldization of their brains.
But in the case of Africa, the damage that is currently being inflicted on the African people, by the Chinese Economic Juggernaut, may be irreversible. Threatened species rely on those waters to stay clean and not be choked by tailing and debris from a Chinese Rare Earth Element or Lithium mine. Downtown Capetown has their ultrachill and sophisticated cultural touchstones that will be priced out of the market, but where can they move? Into the waves? Chinese resource money and Saudi oil money have pushed South Africans onto the beach, where they will soon live in homelessness.
The best laid plans of mice and men go oft’ awry. And many of these Chinese workers in Africa will end up living there until their final breath. They will raise Chinese-African children, they will cuddle Chinese-African grandchildren, and they will be licked on the face by a Chihuahua on the back deck of a Chinese-African home, with a view all the way to Cradle of Humanity itself. These views, these cultures, these rivers, mountains, skies and sidewalks of Africa — especially West Africa — the Chinese Industrialists need to see these as parts of their new home, and protect them with a fervor, even more so than their African neighbor protects them.
Yes, the world has run over Africa, we’ve stolen, looted and raped. But now China is in Africa, and they need to do things differently than we did; every mine needs to be invisible, every river needs to be cleaner than the day you arrived, the air needs to be even more clean than it was before you came. If you don’t want to do it this way, then the Tribes of Africa who were there before you came, they will demote you. There are millions of Tribal Elders of Africa, and they get along a whole lot better with each other when you pollute their rivers. So if you want to maintain your investment as long as possible, keep it clean.