Repository | Book | Chapter

China is a distant empire, a wondrous kingdom, an economic miracle, a revolutionary utopia; China is where all cheap stuff is made, where pandas come from, and pollution, and bespectacled politicians in black suits with awkward smiles who deny human rights to their people. China is stagnant and history-less, without progress unless foreigners supply it, but also standing up, ever rising peacefully yet menacingly with a Communist Party that bans trade unions on behalf of global capitalism. Today, the East is Red and the dragon finally soars, expanding its influence across the world, lending us money and convincing us all that we need to learn its language. Civilizations are clashing, East and West are meeting, and China is no different from everybody else in an increasingly borderless world, except that the Chinese are xenophobic and two-faced. The twenty-first century belongs to China unless they screw up, global capitalism withdraws its favors, the people revolt, or the rest of the world finally grows tired of China-watching and applies the collection of fanciful metaphors to some other, equally badly understood, country in some other, equally distant, part of the world.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137464729_3

Full citation: