A report last June cited in the New York Times and quoted on the House floor – China graduates nine times as many engineers (600,000) as the United States (70,000) – was met in the United States with such disbelief that "a Duke professor had his students check the numbers." Just think of it: China, known not so long ago only for its silks and fine china, graduates nine times as many engineers as the United States, said by the cultural sophisticates to have no culture of its own, except Edison's inventions, machines, technology!
But is this change surprising? In a dictatorship (the word hardly ever applied in the West to post-1949 China), the number of graduates in a field depends on the money the omnipotent dictatorship allocates (secretly if necessary) on the education in the field. Since the population of China exceeds more than 4 times that of the United States, the dictatorship of China may ere long graduate not 9, but 90, times as many engineers as does the United States.
By 2000, China had established educational exchange and cooperation with 154 countries and regions, which had enabled 300,000 Chinese students to study overseas.
This is how the Beijing correspondent of NewYorkTimes.com (June 20, 2006) described the life of American and Chinese physicists in China:
Hardly a week goes by without an announcement of another research initiative or new investment in a building or an institute. It is hard to find an American physicist who is not on his way to China to consult or collaborate, or has just come from China, glowing [!] about the experience.
"The Chinese are so smart they knock your socks off," said Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist who visits here often. "The impression you get when you go over there is that China is going to take over the world soon."
Well, even before 1939 the German Nazis lacked this friendly recognition of their superiority and the conclusion that Germany was "going to take over the world soon."
The Western inventor and philanthropist Fred Kavli has endowed two research institutes in Beijing with several million dollars each. Marvin I. Cohen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is president of the American Physical Society, was impressed by an up-to-date physics building that he saw in Beijing. "Someone [like Fred Kavli] writes a $10 million check, and they build the building in Beijing that we wanted in Berkeley," he said.
Does professor Cohen expect the superior Chinese to study in no better architectural environment than do the inferior Americans?
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Reading such reports about the life of American and Chinese scientists in China, one could not help feeling that we are witnessing a new act of world history unfolding.
Act 1 of world history in the past millennium was war between the crusaders and jihadists. The weapons of the warring sides were roughly the same, and hence the struggle ended in a draw, with Islamic territorial acquisitions.
Act 2 was the Industrial Revolution in Britain, as a result of which the latter obtained superior weapons (such as machine guns) and conquered countries whose total territory at one time exceeded that of England itself more than 90 times.
Act 3 lasted only 12 years (1933-1945), but it demonstrated that a dictatorship can, within seven years, transform a country, virtually defenseless in 1933 under the Treaty of Versailles, into a country that routed France in 1940 within days (the British Expeditionary Force was barely able to escape) and reached Moscow within months after the beginning of the invasion. Hitler could have established world domination by developing nuclear weapons ahead of the United States, had he not begun in 1939 a conventional world war that demanded all his resources.
Act 4. As of today, the population of Germany is less than one-third that of the United States, while the population of China is more than four times larger than that of the United States. The dictatorship of China can develop its military supermight as effectively as Nazi Germany developed its conventional military might from 1933 to 1939, for, just like Hitler, Hu with his subordinates is the ultimate owner of all money and other valuables of the country, for he owns all Chinese as well. But there are four striking differences, apart from Germany being a midget as compared with China, a giant:
(a) In 1939, the attitude of the democratic West toward the German Nazi midget became antagonistic, while the NewYorkTimes.com report I quoted above indicates that as of 2006 the attitude of the democratic West toward the Chinese totalitarian giant is more cooperative than it was toward the German Nazi midget even in 1938, before Hitler launched a conventional world war in 1939.
(b) As a result, China's supermight of superweapons is being developed not only by 1.3 billion Chinese, but also by the entire West and Putin's Russia, for every or almost every Western or Russian scientist and technologist will be honored to work for the totalitarian giant of China, especially if Hu and his subordinates give him a salary higher than he would receive anywhere else.
(c) Of course, what superweapons are being developed by China is a top secret, which Western intelligence/espionage has never penetrated. But the geostrategy as a whole is mentioned in open Chinese sources. Widely used in them is the Chinese phrase shashou jian, "assassin's mace," that is, a weapon capable of finishing the enemy at one strike, as the United States made Japan surrender unconditionally in 1945 at the strike of nuclear weapons.
Significantly, the Chinese top military bureaucrats call superweapons "assassin's mace weapons." An article (Feb. 13, 2001) in the People's Liberation Army Daily by a bureaucrat from the Policy Section of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party revealed that then-dictator Jiang Zemin had called for the speediest development of assassin's mace weapons in his speech in August 1999, which had not been mentioned publicly for a year and a half.
Hitler began war in 1939, that is, as soon as he felt he was able to fight. To Jian or Hu this approach is "big nosed" (the Chinese nickname for the non-Chinese), that is, stupid, risky, suicidal. There should be no war, but instead shashou jian, a strike incapacitating the enemy.
By an accident of history, since Hitler was defeated without nuclear weapons, while the U.S. war with Japan (the Pearl Harbor aggressor) was going on, the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, which surrendered unconditionally. That's shashou jian! Except that for the United States, it was a matter of accidental circumstances, while the dictatorship of China is preparing it as its geostrategy, supported by ancient Chinese strategists.
(d) Possibly, Professor Andrew Strominger of Harvard (see NewYorkTimes.com above) assumes that after the unconditional surrender of the United States, U.S. scientists and technologists will be received in China with the same hospitality they are received in 2006. The trouble is that most Americans know little about what life is like in the dictatorship of China and know even less about what life (or death) will be like in a country that has surrendered unconditionally to that dictatorship, which persecutes even native Chinese for Falun Gong, a kind of Chinese gymnastics, while neither Hitler nor Stalin persecuted Germans and Russians, respectively, for any gymnastics.