Of Chinese Terracotta Soldiers and Deepwater Mines

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
I have been keeping a file on China for about the last eight years, ever since we started to borrow huge sums of money from the place where we buy most of our consumer goods.

The Chinese have had a fascinating history over thousands of years, lurching from totalitarianism to communism while having billions of progeny.

I think the Chinese suggested they would replace us and become the superstars of the 21st century during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The opening and closing ceremonies and site architecture were dazzling, imaginative, and certainly trend-setting. It will be a challenge for any country to match them.

The Chinese have been very busy building Asia’s largest navy over the last decade and have dramatically narrowed the balance of power when they revealed they were developing a land-based anti-ship missile that could destroy one of our supercarriers at a distance of more than 900 miles. That distance exceeds the range of any of our carrier-based aircraft.

In addition to this weapon, while our admirals and generals are always busy fighting the last war, China is investing heavily in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles.

While we are busy building another $20 billion supercarrier to fight in the streets of some foreign city, the Chinese are spending a tiny portion of that in developing the Dong Feng 21D, a carrier-destroying missile that can penetrate the defenses of one and completely disable it while it is moving at 30 knots in seas 900 miles away.

It seems to me that’s a real checkmate. Sure, carriers still have some use perhaps as the carrier of the flag, but with a 1,092-foot flight deck loaded with F-18 aircraft and 6,250 personnel, it may become the largest swimming duck in the world if the Chinese can perfect the missile.
The Chinese Have Come a Long Way Over a Twisting Path
Perhaps the potential of the Chinese people was demonstrated over 2,000 years ago when Emperor Qin, at age 13, in order to be remembered after his death, ordered the construction of his tomb, requiring the work of hundreds of thousands of workers over a 36-year period. Qin also ordered that any supervisors and designers involved in the work be buried alive in the tomb so its secret areas would be protected.

The tomb has become one of China’s most popular tourist attractions—and no one knows how large it is yet. So far three huge underground pits totaling over 20,000 sq. ft., buried about 20 feet below ground level have been excavated.

Within rooms and corridors, over 8,000 life-size terracotta figures of warriors and horses have been placed in orderly rows or in fighting postures. Paved corridors separated by earthen walls contain the figures.

Originally the corridors were covered with wooden planks and fiber mats forming a roof covered with several feet of earth. In 2,000 years some of the roofs have collapsed damaging the figures.

The figures are arranged in battle formations or riding in horse-drawn chariots. Each figure is an individual casting of clay, all life-sized and wearing uniforms of their rank and carrying weapons such as spears, bows, arrows, and other weapons. The weapons have turned to dust over 2,000 years.

The heads were fired separately from the bodies in furnaces reaching between 950 and 1,050 degrees centigrade, very high-tech for that period.  The arms and legs are usually solid, but the torsos and heads of both men and horses are hollow.

The human heads are unique. Made up of two parts, each of the figures has individually sculpted ears, nose, hair and facial features. All pieces or armor and costumes were also individually sculpted. No two of the figures are the same, and the names of the craftsmen who created the figure are inscribed on the robe, leg, or armor of the individual.

What this tomb says about the Chinese people is certainly debatable. After all, the archeologists doing the digging say they have yet to discover the main entrance to the tomb.

Over two hundred years before Emperor Qin, who was later said to be the first one to “unify” China, Emperor Shih Huang Ti thought that if he burned all the documents in the kingdom and buried alive all of the scholars with “old ideas” all history would begin with him. Evidently he was not successful.
“The Americans Eat Too Many Hamburgers!”
Tom Friedman of the New York Times spends a lot of time covering Asia, so I always read his articles. While covering the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China recently, he wrote of a Chinese TV skit that reveals a great deal about what the Chinese think of us.
The skit has four children-a Chinese, an American, an Indian, and a Brazilian preparing to race. Before the race,  Anthony, the American child, brags he will win “because I always win.” Anthony jumps out to a huge lead but soon doubles over with stomach cramps. The Chinese child shouts: “Now is our chance to overtake for the first time!”  The Brazilian child asks: “What’s wrong with Anthony?”  The Indian child responds: “He is overweight and flabby. He ate too many hamburgers!”

The Chinese really sense an opening in dethroning us and overtaking us.  They invest in the future while we invest in the Wall Street Casino.

Newsweek’s leading story last week was headlined “We’re No. 11!” The U.S., according to Newsweek, isn’t even in the top ten of the best countries in the world anymore.

We have been in a grand funk for a decade. Tom Friedman writes, “We had a values breakdown–a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. (Like fighting two wars and giving big tax cuts to the wealthy and putting a nutty prescription drug program on the national credit card.) 

Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot.com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs. 

Not only did education decline because of lack of funding (A decade ago we graduated a higher ratio of students from college than any one else. Now we are 12th.), we paid no attention to oil addiction and climate change.

In the last decade we had our brightest minds work on preparing financial crap (credit default swaps, derivatives, subprime bundling) for the Wall Street Casinos instead of working on developing real products to maintain our No. 1 position
“Bush Led the Country on a Heedless Eight-Year Binge”
Michael Kinsley summarized our last decade this way: “We’re now on our third Boomer president. The first was Bill Clinton who left the budget in surplus…”

“But it is the second Boomer president, George W.Bush, who best represents the generation, at least so far; it is Bush who performed the generational feat of making the least of the most opportunity. Under a cloak of moral seriousness, he led the country on a heedless eight-year binge…”

“By the time Bush left office, he had almost doubled the national debt to more than $10 trillion, with two wars and little else to show for it beyond new federal giveaways that are still digging us into a deeper hole.”

While Bush was lurching from mediocrity to failure, the Chinese continued to put economic, technical, and industrial pressure on us.

The Chinese said, “We may want to buy Boeing airplanes, but we want to make a lot of the parts. We like your cars, but build your plants in China and we will supply the cheap labor.” 
Thus China pressed the greedy and blind U.S. and European businessmen to transfer their capital and best technology to Chinese firms. This ensured that advanced innovation and techniques would expand in China. And they developed real frontiers on their own.

The United States used to lead the world in the development and use of submersible subs. As early as 1960, we sent a U.S. Navy officer to a spot seven miles down to the deepest ocean area. But since then we have fallen behind France, Russia, Japan, and China in developing this kind of undersea craft.

This summer three Chinese scientists went to the bottom of the South China Sea and planted the Chinese flag. There are trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals and oil on and under the sea floor.

And there are thousands of intelligence “objects” such as undersea cables, lost nuclear devices, other sunken submarines still loaded with valuable intelligence, and warheads fired in missile tests by many countries. A treasure trove of intelligence and military secrets.

China is currently testing the undersea craft Jiaolong which will be capable of operating for long periods at 4.35 miles deep. At the present time no other country has that capability.

China, although rated a poor country when judged against others, is also energetically working on supercomputers and jumbo jets. It is building a network of 42 high-speed rail lines connecting cities where a majority of its 1.34 billion population live. We haven’t built one line yet.

China may be ahead of us in the development of broadband and green energy technology.
“American Republicans Think Climate Change Is a J-O-K-E, Chinese Communists Think It Means J-O-B-S”
 
In a Tom Friedman article about climate change, he reviews the difference between Chinese and American attitudes. The Chinese chairperson of the China-U.S. Collaboration on Clean Energy Committee says, “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste their time questioning scientific data.” 

Some surveys rank our high school students as being 48th in the world in scientific knowledge. Our politicians are much worse than that.

Chairman Peggy Liu of the Committee says, “China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world.” China has already invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart electrical grids, LED lighting, rural biomass, and low carbon communities. Liu adds: “There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat, and breathe pollution every day.” 

Instead of accepting scientific facts, American Republicans have turned climate change into a know-nothing wedge issue.

Friedman also tells the story of Mike Biddle who has invented a process for separating plastic from tons of junked electronics and appliances. He recycles the plastic into pellets using less than 10 percent of the energy used to make virgin plastic from oil. In the last three years his company, MBA Polymers, has “mined” 100 million pounds of old plastic. U.S. taxpayers paid for research grants that developed the process.

But he has a tiny headquarters in California while his major factories are in Austria, China, and Britain. Why? Those countries have passed energy laws requiring consumers to recycle anything with a cord, battery, or precious metal—and it must be at the cost of the manufacturer. Such laws assure a constant source of materials for processing.

Biddle tried to get our Congress to copy the recycling laws of Europe, Japan, and China. He failed. So the tech jobs for his process are all overseas. As Friedman writes sarcastically, “Aren’t we clever?”

Normally Friedman keeps his temper, but he is clearly angry. “I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system…I am hoping to light a spark under America…There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity, and stick-to-it-iveness that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before.”

“But we are not doing it now because too many of our politicians, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.”

An interesting note.  China now dominates the mining and refining of rare metals used in computers, hard drives, and sensitive defense equipment. We used to stockpile rare metals, but when China sold cheap around the world in the 1990’s we dismantled our rare earth mining and let the Chinese do it. Now their profits are enormous–and they are beginning to limit exports.

The Communists seem to know something about priorities—and business, too. 

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