"China Shakes the World" [.]

[fiefoe]

Exchanges:

• It would not have seemed worthy of note to (the Italians) then that most of the people they employed to sweep floors, cut cloth, and sew on labels came from Wenzhou, probably the most entrepreneurial place in all China.
• Free trade had been their lifeline, and the city of (Wenzhou) was one of the last places to submit to Communist rule after the 1949 revolution.
• The emperor Justinian is said to have commissioned Persian holy men to smuggle the eggs of _Bombyx mori, the silkworm, and mulberry seeds into Constantinople in 550... Sericulture flourished in Como.
• When Chirac.. struck up a friendship with Jiang Zemin that was so attentive it bordered on courtship, some people found it hard to know where to look.
• The potent lure of the 1.3-billion-person market, no matter how illusory it may be, has helped China to leapfrog some of the technology barriers that had stymied several of the Southeast Asian "tiger" economies in the 1980s and 1990s.
• In 1970.. it was hard to believe that crude oil prices would rise much from their prevailing level of around $1.7 a barrel.

So many problems:

• China's endowments are deeply lopsided. The profound damage done to its physical environment contrasts with the prodigious strength of its human capital.
• Nobody is yet ready to admit that China's current depended on imports of foreign oil is due, at least in part, to the wasteful exploitation of (Daqing) that was in its day a symbol of self-reliance.
• Zheng He's junk ships would have been prohibitively expensive for most of the three hundred years before the current era - a fact that may help explain why China turned in on itself.
• In 1938.. a retreating Chiang Kai-shek.. broke the dikes at Huayuankou, in Henan .. (in an desperate attempt) to stall the Japanese advance... up to 900,000 died.
• The ideogram for "political control" in Chinese - 治 - shows three drops of water next to a dike or platform.
• In late 1990s it emerged that the waters of the Huai were so toxic that... they could not even be used for irrigation.
• Mencius's quotations: "If beans and millet were as plentiful as fire and water, such a thing as a bad man would not exist among people."
• Trust is a commodity constantly under siege. Poverty and the competition for scarce resources impinge upon it. The daily diet of propaganda disorients it. The venality of officials devalues it. The ascendancy of a value system dominated by money hollows it out.
• One of the most intriguing identity subterfuges involves the number plates on officials' cars.
• It is widely accepted that China's crisis of trust, environmental malaise, rampant piracy, and official corruption derive at least in part from systemic inadequacies (i.e. the top-down authoritarian regime) thrown up by the country's transition.
• In the late 1980s (bankruptcy law) was the Rubicon that, once, crossed, rendered hollow any lingering pretense that Beijing was trying to build and economy along Communist lines. Communism was all about production, not profit and loss.

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