"...The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives....
...The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order....
...But the world order we have grown used to - and comfortable with - over the last century is coming to an end.
Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: "When China awakes, she will shake the world."
After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people - twice the population of the U.S. and EU combined - is awaking almost overnight....
...Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing. Most worryingly, as China's brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human rights....
...Yet Western governments have been in such awe of China's looming power that their response has not been to challenge its abuses, but to try to silence their own protesters at home.
From the UN to the IMF to the World Bank, the international institutions that attempt to govern the planet were made in the image of the victors of World War II. Now power is shifting from West to East, the whole liberal democratic world order will face its first serious challenge in decades....
...Many fear that things could get ugly....
...There is only one thing worse than an unchallenged superpower - it is a superpower with a victim mentality, which feels the world owes it a favour. "
Just a few snippets from an excellent opnion piece by Anthony Browne for the Daily Mail.
I've bored my friends and family for years with my growing concerns about China and India. Pure math made it painfully obvious that a reckoning was due and a look at history made it a safe bet that the reckoning, when it came, would be painful.
Advice to the kiddies.....learn Chinese for a brighter future. I'm old, live in SoCal, so will continue to struggle with Spanish. But if I were still a student.....
Catch you later.....
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