The current modern age pulsates with potential and buzzes with excitement. The engine driving this is China 中国 . In a very short space of time China consciousness has exploded onto the world stage. To me this seems to have occured in the last two years. In that period I have chosen to live in Australia. Here the North East Asian influence is palpable.
Of course this is nonesense. In global terms China has never been unimportant. It was easily the largest economy in the world well into the 19th Century. It was only temporarily displaced by the UK in the 19th and the US in the 20th centuries.
Such a country, powerful for over two millenium, understandably grew complacent in its political economic self perception. It had a uniquely effective source of power in its soil and its means to exploit it. China was beautifully crafted philisophically and adminstratively to be dominant in the agricultural age.
Such a well adapterd agricultural country and regime clearly had severe adjustment difficulty when the source of wealth and power shifted to that derivable from science and entrepreneurial enterprise, the industrial revolution. In consequence, in the modern era, China's comparative wealth and power declined rapidly. China has spent most of the last century adjusting to the political economic reality of modernism. It is no longer wrong footed with that. Its successfully efforts to catch up on modernism are very impressive. They are doing so at the fastest rate of any country in history. This is the engine driving the current global economy.
However the rest of us are already beginning to live in a post-modern age. It is not yet evident that China truly understands this The basis of political economic power is shifting again. this shift is a way from the machine driven industrial base of the moderism on which capitalism was built to the shifting values of the post modern age based on the creation and distribution of knowledge and perception. The Chineses are not alone in such myopia. It also seems to be a disease of the country that came to dominate the modern era, the USA, which do its own disadvantage lloks far too much inwards to its own huge domestic market of 300mill+ and stable and largely ignores the global market place of 6.5million + and growing.
One family in the US has notably avoided this general myopia the Bush family. They were quickly onto the outword looking post modern game. George Bush senior became the US government's first official representative in China. As such he established deep and lasting relationships between his family and the up and coming leadership of erly 21st Century China.
Few other Americans even acknowledge much beyond the existence of a world outside the USA. 9/11 may have changed that perceptualy but paradoxically, apart from the military, even fewer American's now make the connections the Bush family recognised are essential for success in the New Age. Most American's have found that "they" don't like us and avoid travelling to where "they" are, the rest of the planet.
The Bush family is not only well connected in China. They also connect in that other area of the world signicant to the post modern survival of humnaity, the Middle East. Many years ago they connected into Saudi Arabia, not least to the Bin Laden family. This is to be expected of Texas Oilmen. In fact this is far more to be expected than the Chinese connection. This American family have demonstrated the pay-off from such outreach. It is to be hoped that more and more Americans will get the message. Unfortunately at the moment they do not. If they do not they will be left behind like China but for a different reason.
China is myopic abut post modernism because they see wealth in industrial capitialistic terms and post moderism is politically scary anarchy. The US is myopic about the consequences of post moderism for while a lot of americans are engaged with it their engagement is limited to a field of view determined by the geopolitical boundaries of the USA or even of their own state within it. American's are the children of the world but when looking out from their own situation frequently see themselves in a mirror and believe that to be the rest of the planet.
It is sad that global US connectivity is not more widepread. Such connectivity could presage fruitful, happy, significant wider and deeper satisfying and lucrative relationships. If more US players could learn from the Bush family and choose to put down deeper global roots out future world could be better faster. If Americans would participate with the rest of us to establish strong bases of operation in and between the three most significant geographical regions and philsophical forms of our "Post-modern Age" all our lives would be better faster:-
- China and North East Asian communality ,
- US and North Atlantic libertarian individualism
- the Middle East and Islams balanced marriage between communal responsibity and individual rights and freedom before the power of the universe.
It is evident that the Middle East is reaching out to the rest of the planet as the rest of the planet reaches into it. The wealth generated by its mastery of the planets store of energy is being used to establish global connectivity fromthe Gulf to the Resst of the Planet. Those leading in Middle East know that their current basis of wealth is short term. They are acting to be well placed at the maturity of the Post Modern Era.
China is similarly reaching out but seems to do so in what is a largely passe manner. China is becoming ever more effective at identifying and accessing the natural physical resources needed to dominate in a modernising industrial age. In this their current behaviour emulates that of the UK in the 19th and the US and Europe in the 20th Century. The problem for China is that we are at the beginning of the Post Modern Age. How can a communitarian industrial China jump start itself into such and era? Virtual not physical resources now pave the Way 路 to economic and political power and it is important to us all that China becomes fully engaged in sharing that power with the rest of us.
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