This link has been bookmarked by 24 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Apr 2008, by isaac Mao.
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18 Apr 08
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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.
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15 Apr 08
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13 Apr 08
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Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?
It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government's failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.
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.
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Their economies are growing on a long-term basis about four times the speed of the UK's and that of the United State
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Goldman Sachs, the bank, recently predicted that by 2050, China and India would have overtaken the U.S. to be the world's first and second biggest economies.
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competition for raw materials is pitting East against West.
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China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper
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China alone consumes half the world's cement and a third of its steel.
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When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.
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cost of living in Britain is now rising faster than wages, making the British on average poorer year on year.
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buying up Western companies
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copper-rich
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coal and metals
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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.
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Its comparative weakness over the last few centuries is, in fact, but a blip in the last 2,000 years, during which China was the world's most economically and culturally advanced nation.
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It is an accident of history that Europeans took advantage of their window of opportunity in the last half of the second millennium to take over the world.
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12 Apr 08
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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. From Darfur to Myanmar, China is cuddling up to murderous dictators. At home, it holds mass executions of criminals with bullets in the back of the head while transplant surgeons stand by to harvest their still pulsating organs. 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. And the bitter truth is that, after centuries of humiliation in foreign affairs, there is a nationalist mood in China that the country's time has come again, that it can again claim its rightful place as the world's most powerful country. Its comparative weakness over the last few centuries is, in fact, but a blip in the last 2,000 years, during which China was the world's most economically and culturally advanced nation.
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The boys in blue: Chinese security men escorting the Olympic torch on the streets of London last weekend. Many were shocked by their heavy-handed tactics
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China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.
As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world's cement and a third of its steel.
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As their economic confidence grows, Asians are discovering pride in their own cultures and are less inclined to mimic Western ones.
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11 Apr 08
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