FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
New York Times in Strong China Reassessment, Acknowledges, ‘The American Dream Is Alive—in China’
Nov. 20, 2018 (EIRNS)—The Sunday New York Times of Nov. 18 launched a series of articles on China which, to a significant extent, countered many of the lies that have been spread by the anti-China barrage of the past months, and encapsulated by the mad Vice President Mike Pence, first at the Hudson Institute on Oct. 4 and then at the ASEAN and APEC meetings in Asia last week. But readers need to remember how the British Empire has occasionally been forced to acknowledge its failed policies, in order to restructure its approach to preserve the Empire. The Times lays out a warning that a conflict may well be inevitable or necessary.
The package includes Part 1 of a five-part series titled “China Rules—They Didn’t Like the West’s Playbook. So They Wrote Their Own.” Part 1 is titled “The Land That Failed To Fail,” by the Times’ Asia Editor Philip Pan. The next four parts are due in the Sunday New York Times Nov. 25 issue. Part 1 was accompanied by five separate articles by other writers packaged as “How China Became a Superpower.”
Part 1 of “China Rules” by Pan describes at some length how China rejected the West’s (read British Empire) formula for how nations should behave. “Eight U.S. Presidents assumed,” he writes,
“that China would eventually bend.... Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or, the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot. But neither happened.”
His kicker is: “The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It’s still waiting.”
Pan reviews the reform process, beginning in 1984 when a number of economists around Deng Xiaoping met in Shanghai to discuss “how to catch up with the West.” After 40 years of uninterrupted growth, Pan says, “China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college grads, and by some accounts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1%,” and China has become the “most significant rival to the U.S. since the fall of the U.S.S.R.”
He then warns that Xi Jinping is “steering toward repression again, tightening his grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands, setting up rule for life,” and so on. The remaining four parts, to be published Sunday, Nov. 25, are titled: “How To Control Your Citizens: Opportunity, Nationalism, Fear”; “What’s China Doing There? And There? Staking Its Claim as a World Power”; “China’s economy became #2 by defying #1. Now it’s at a crossroads”; and “The Road to Confrontation.”
Of the accompanying articles in the Nov. 18 issue, one is an attack on the Belt and Road, reviewing 600 projects around the world, including 41 pipelines, 203 bridges, roads and rail lines, and 199 power plants. These are all primarily aimed at facilitating China itself, they claim, while the power plants are mostly coal fired, “which collectively pollute more than Spain.” Their ports, they assert, could be used by the PLA Navy. Three others are on: China’s effort to equal the West in microchips; China’s internet companies matching those of the U.S.; and China’s influence on Hollywood.
The most interesting, however, is titled “The American Dream Is Alive. In China.” It asks the reader to imagine two 19-year-olds, both raised in poverty—one in the U.S. and one in China. Who has “the better chance at upward mobility?” In the past, this would easily be the American, it says, following “the American dream.” But today, “China has risen so quickly that your chances of improving your station in life there vastly exceed those in the United States.”
It goes on: “China is still much poorer over all than the United States. But the Chinese have taken a commanding lead in that most intangible but valuable of economic indicators: optimism.”
