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Friday, May 16
The Indiana Daily Student

Unweaving the present

SHANGHAI -- Listen: China has come unstuck in time.\nIn Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong, it's the 19th century. China is now the world's largest importer of scrap metal, and the United States, the world's largest scrap-metal exporter, ships millions of tons of iron, copper, aluminum, zinc, lead and nickel to meet the country's demand. \nThe worst abuses of capitalism are on display in the yards, the Far Eastern Economic Review reports: To salvage metal from computers, monitors and consumer electronics, "workers protected by nothing more than woolen mittens and surgical masks pour caustic acids onto circuit boards and collect precious metals after the burn." For sorting the metal, workers make a $ 100 a month.\nMeanwhile, in Shanghai, it's five years from now. Last week, in a taxi cab, I watched a local news report in a television mounted in the seatback in front of me. The screen showed a live image of the freeway my cab was driving on. I was both the viewer and the viewed -- an utterly delectable and truly postmodern experience.\nI reflected on the differences between Shenzhen's industrial workers and my own life while reading the Economist and The Asian Wall Street Journal in the Starbucks at the intersection of Nanjing West Street and Shaanxi North Street. Neither the sleek, chic and pretty Chinese women near me nor their portly, homely and Western companions looked like they spent much time stripping the insulation from copper wire. I, of course, have been spending my time reading history and slowly learning Mandarin.\nAnd so it appears as if part of China is trapped in yet another era -- the height of European imperialism.\nAfter the Opium War's end in 1842, life was good in China -- for Westerners. European powers (and later the United States and Japan) forced China to open its markets to European firms. They also insisted on the right to try citizens of European nations in European courts, even for offenses like the murder of Chinese subjects by Europeans. Western dominance extended to nearly ridiculous measures: Some parks in Western-controlled areas banned the presence of dogs and Chinese.\nToday, upscale shopping developments like Xintiandi, just down the street from the site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, feature bars and nightclubs where there are more foreign customers than Chinese. Understandable -- Few Chinese can afford the steep prices, while foreigners paid in American or European currencies at salaries comparable to those in New York, London or Frankfurt find Shanghai to be marvelously cheap. The waitstaff at the bars in Xintiandi, of course, are all native-born Chinese.\nBut appearances are deceptive. While foreign business people in Shanghai (a category including South Koreans, Singaporeans and Taiwanese) are wealthier than the average Chinese, their positions are not comparable to the imperialists'. No country has forced an unequal treaty on the Chinese to open the ports to foreign trade, China is governed by Chinese, and Chinese courts try all criminals for all crimes.\n Globalization is not imperialism. The government in Beijing has decided to use trade to enrich both the populace and itself as a way to tighten the Communist regime's grasp on power. \n Joint ventures with foreign companies are as much an instrument of Chinese policy as the People's Liberation Army. That has resulted in the misery of the scrap yards of Shenzhen as well as the cosmopolitanism of the Starbucks of Shaanxi Street.\nAnd the Chinese trade policy does seem to be making life better for the average Chinese citizen. Although many Chinese are still desperately poor, the worst symbol of Western dominance in China -- the rickshaw pulled by a coolie -- has been replaced by the ubiquitous Volkswagen Santana taxicab. It's good to know, at least, that history has gotten unstuck from that period.

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