Chinese schoolchildren invariably fill the highest positions in the
various international maths and science tests that are held every
year, way above Americans and Europeans. Yet in terms of creative
thinking and discoveries in science, China is almost nowhere. Every
now and again, senior Chinese officials admit that they are a
seriously worried about the lack of innovative thinking among their
young people.
What's more, Chinese officialdom knows what to blame. It's the
intensive rote-learning nature of their classrooms, a product of
2,200 years of heavy authoritarianism -- an unfortunate byproduct of
an otherwise benign philosophy that was originally designed for
relatively small kingdoms and principalities. Changing cultures,
however, is not so easy and what the Chinese would like by way of
a more versatile education system is probably at least a century
away. Meanwhile, rich and middle-class Chinese parents are encouraged
to send their children and young people abroad in the hope that, once
educated in more lateral-thinking cultures, they will return to China
and bring creativity back with it.
There's little doubt that the Chinese are clever enough. On standard
Western-designed IQ tests, coastal province Chinese score the same
as, if not a little higher than the average European or American. So
they're just as good as any wannabe advanced nation-state has ever
been at reverse engineering goods from elsewhere and then copying
them. In the last 30 or 40 years since the Deng Xiaoping revolution,
China has been acting no differently from several northern European
countries and America in the 17th and 18th centuries when copying the
new industrial techniques and consumer products of England.
One of the greatest English inventions was a financial one. This was
the refinement and final establishment in the latter decades of the
19th century of a practical gold-standard financial system from Isaac
Newton's original definition of the value of a Sovereign gold coin
as the same free market value as a standard weight of pure gold. So
successful was this new system that, prior to World War I (1914), the
Bank of England was not only by far the largest bank in the world,
but the practicalities of gold standard national currencies was
already spreading like wildfire to Europe, America (north and south)
and Asia (Japan particularly).
What stopped the gold-standard in its evangelical tracks was World
War I and the sheer scale and cost of it. If armaments had been
bought only with gold-backed currencies then WWI would have been over
within by mid-1915. When it became obvious that Germany would not be
stopped then the Allies had no option but to start printing banknotes
in huge quantities with the promise to its suppliers and those who
bought bonds that, if desired, their pounds would be redeemable with
gold after the war.
At the end of WWI, Germany had about four to five times the number of
banknotes in its money supply as at its beginning. France, Belgium
and one or two others had three to four times the number. England had
three times as many, and even America, with all its vast natural
resources available at lower cost, still had twice as many dollars in
circulation in 1918 as is in 1914. However, all of them (starting
with England), keen though they were to re-establish a gold standard
and get back to normal trading, tried to put the cart before the
horse. Here, national pride in their previous currencies took over.
Instead of taking their punishment in a practical way by re-setting
their currencies at their new depreciated values against a standard
weight of gold, they tried to re-establish their currencies to pre-war levels.
It didn't work, and we've had nothing but constant booms and busts
ever since. And they've been increasingly frequent and increasingly
extreme. But what if the Chinese were to reverse engineer the history
of our current problem and diagnose exactly why and when it started
going wrong? Their economists are surely as capable of doing this as
their engineers have when copying products. Indeed, the chances are
very high that they've done this because, for the past 10 years, they
have been calling on America to jointly establish a world trading
currency based on something that is both valuable in its own right
and stable in quantity. China has been repeatedly snubbed. America
wants to retain its dollar as the No 1 world currency.
That China is now the largest domestic gold miner and refiner in the
world and, in the last two years or so, has been increasingly buying
gold in the world market place as well as a few gold mines here and
there around the world when allowed to (e.g. Canada and Brazil),
suggests very strongly that it has a fully-designed Plan B on its
drawing board awaiting only the undivided attention and agreement of
both the Eurozone and America when their currencies finally come to nought.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
