Seven Years between China and the United States - Thomas Friedman.

It is very worthwhile for every Chinese to take a serious look


The New York Times of the United States shocked the comparison between China and the United States, and caused a sensation among the top officials of the White House!

The famous New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an article entitled "Seven Years between China and the United States", which was published in the New York Times and shocked the White House!
He wrote: "As I sit in my seat at a Chinese venue and enjoy the magical performance of thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts, I can't help but think back to the past seven years. Different experiences in the US: China has been busy with all kinds of infrastructure work, and we have been busy with al Qaeda (terrorists); they have been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads, and parks, and we have been In building better metal detectors, Humvees, and unmanned reconnaissance aircraft...
Differences are already starting to show. You can compare New York's squalid LaGuardia airport to Shanghai's sleek international airport. As you drive to Manhattan, you realize how rundown the infrastructure is along the way. Experience Shanghai's 220-mile-per-hour maglev train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion technology instead of ordinary steel wheels and tracks. In the blink of an eye, you have arrived in downtown Shanghai. Then ask yourself: Who exactly lives in a third world country?

In my opinion: as a modern country, China has accepted the main concepts of modern national sovereignty and human rights. But the characteristics of Chinese civilization make it unique. One of the characteristics of China's development model is: learning + innovation + scale effect from huge population = impact on China and the world. Many foreign companies investing in China have a slogan that if they can be the first in China, they can be the first in the world.
With the rise of China, this trend is beginning to expand to more and more fields, such as tourism, aviation, film and television, sports, education, new energy, modernization models, high-speed rail, etc.

Some of us are more envious of the life of a small country with few people. In fact, a small country has the difficulties of a small country. Small countries cannot withstand storms, but big countries have much more room for maneuver when they encounter storms.
Chile is a relatively developed developing country, but a major earthquake in 2010 caused a large drop in GDP, and the entire economy may be out of breath for two years. Even if China encounters such a big natural disaster as the Wenchuan earthquake, the entire economy will suffer. The country's economy remains stagnant.
For most countries, industrial upgrading often means relocating industries to foreign countries, and China can carry out large-scale industrial gradient transfers within itself, which prolongs the life cycle of China's manufacturing industry.

Culture - The collision of Chinese and Western cultures over the past three decades has not caused most Chinese people to lose their cultural confidence. The Confucian craze, Laozi craze, chanting craze, calligraphy and painting craze, tea ceremony craze, old house craze, cultural relic craze, traditional Chinese medicine craze, and health care craze among Chinese people today all reflect the revival of traditional Chinese culture.
The catering culture, health preservation culture and leisure culture derived from the Chinese culture are also incomparable to other cultures. Street restaurants anywhere in China can make 30 or 40 kinds of dishes, while most restaurants in the United States only have hamburgers and potato chips, and it is good to have three or four dishes. European restaurant dishes are richer, but rarely more than seven or eight varieties.
Some of us are always worried that the Chinese lack religious sentiment. In fact, anyone who is a little familiar with world history knows that religious conflicts in human history have led to countless wars. The conflict between Christian denominations and between Christianity and Islam alone has a history of thousands of years, resulting in human tragedies in which countless lives were killed. Therefore, our people do not necessarily have to believe in religion.

Economy --- Economics in the traditional Chinese sense is not "market economics" strictly speaking, but "people-oriented economics". In China's long history, if a government cannot develop the economy, improve people's livelihood, and handle catastrophes well, it will lose the support of the people, lose the "mandate of heaven", and eventually be overthrown by the people.
Today's political parties in China are a continuation of the historically unified Confucian ruling bloc tradition, not Western political parties that compete with each other on behalf of different interest groups. Many people in the West only agree with the legitimacy of the regime arising from multi-party competition, which is a very shallow political concept.
I once met an American scholar who questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese regime, and I asked him why he didn't question the legitimacy of his own country first: you took other people's land, colonized, immigrated, and exterminated Indians to form today's America . I asked him to explain to me where is the legitimacy and legitimacy of such a country? In the end, he could only tell me that this is history.
So, can we question the source of the legitimacy of Western regimes with China’s concept of “selecting the best and appointing the best”? Bush’s eight years in power brought economic recession to the United States, annihilation to Iraq, and disaster to the world The financial tsunami brought about is an example.
The biggest feature of China's historical legitimacy is the political tradition of "selecting the best and appointing the able" and governing the country with "the people's hearts turn against their backs".

In Chinese political culture, the concepts of "a game of chess in the whole country" and "if one side is in trouble, all sides will support it" cannot be produced by other cultures. I have discussed the Chinese model with Indian scholars. They said that on the surface, China is centralized, but each reform in China actually has strong local characteristics, which compete with each other and complement each other, so the Chinese system is better than that of India. The system is more dynamic.
They have learned from the West and have established a strong modern government system, but at the same time they have their own unique political and cultural resources. The combination of the two makes it easier for us to overcome the populism, shortsightedness, and legalism that plague Western democracies today. And other issues.
At the political level, many in the West also take it for granted that as the Chinese middle class grows, China will also accept the Western confrontational political model. But they also discovered today that today's Chinese middle class seems to value China's political stability more than any other class. They understand that the "democratization" of the West has brought chaos and turmoil to many countries, and that their hard-earned wealth accumulation has actually benefited from China's more than three decades of political stability.
Frankly speaking, what China has shown today cannot be summed up by the overly simple or even crude concepts of "advanced" and "backward", "democracy" and "dictatorship", "high human rights" and "low human rights". "

Thomas Friedman