Gettin' Shanghai'd

I've been saying since 1991 that China was the country I fear most in the future, that they would expand their grasp of power exponentially in the years to come. They have. I'm still scared of China. I'm broken-hearted that I've never fulfilled my dream of getting there before that horrendous damn on the Yangtze has been completed. Soon, thousands of years civilization will be flooded and a legacy of fishing towns up and down that snaking river will be wiped from collective memory. It saddens me. I can't fathom where China will be in a decade; their growth is staggering. The US is on a steady economic decline, and their education is tanking, and slowly a new world power is emerging. What a strange time to be an observer.

Here's an interesting article on the issue of control-freaks struggling to maintain control of a country with a population of 1.3 billion.

I heard a quote recently; any time you have a country with 5% of the world's population spending more than 50% of the world's defense spending, you have a country desperate to hang onto power, but who soon will no longer be able to do so. Sounds eerily true to me.