■"Christie's Going, Going to China to Hold Auctions," by Carol Vogel, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. B1.
■"China Builds Its Dreams and Some Fear a Bubble," by David Barboza, New York Times, 18 October 2005, p. A1.
■"South Korea Becoming a Big Asian Investor," by James Brooke, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. C1.
■"China puts forward its definition of democracy," by Mure Dickie, Financial Times, 20 October 2005, p. 3.
I write this in Blueprint for Action (BFA): when you join the Core it suddenly rediscovers your history, like you were lost for a while and now are found again. This is happening big time in China, and nowhere is that process seen more than in China's art and antiques (even antiquities) scene.
So Nixon goes to China thirty years ago and Christie's goes now. The usual deal: to get around Chinese gov regs, Christie's must partner with local dealer.
So China's growing up all right, right through the sky. Four-thousand skyscrapers in Shanghai alone. In BFA I wrote something I wasn't sure was true until I read this piece: I said that China's skylines routinely rival anything we have here, and even surpass our biggest ones (like NY). Well, NYC has about 2k skyscrapers.
China's building boom is like our 1920s. This year they lay a world-record 4.7 billion square feet of construction. Experts say no country has ever built so much so fast, like a mall twice the size of the Mall of America (take that Minnesota with your hated Vikings!).
Key line:
The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw materials to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage.
New Core, new rules, new everything. Old China is being destroyed like crazy, and preservationists decry it, but with mortgage rates at 5%, there's no stopping the crushóand I do mean crush.
Seventy-five million farmers will move from the rural areas to the cities in the next five years, the biggest migration ever witnessed on the planet. It's one of the six simultaneous revolutions I cite in BFA.
Obviously, China can't finance all that building on its own, so South Korea, maturing quite nicely itself with true pluralistic politics, becomes what many estimate is the largest single foreign investor now in China, to the tune of $6B more or so a year. The 11th largest global economy got that way by declaring it way patriotic to invest only at home. Now it says it's patriotic to do so abroad ("Ask not what you can finance in your country, ask what your country can finance abroad," their version of a JFK might say).
So South Korea has a mere 650 FDI projects in China in 2002, and now it has almost 5,000. Investing in one another has always been an Asian thing. It becomes a New Core thing as well over time (China, Brazil, India, and Russia all investing in one another).
So China is rocketing through time, in all dimensions but what we would call representative democracy on a national scale. China becomes increasingly democratic, in a direct voting sense, throughout the countryside (where tiny villages of . . . oh, several hundred thousand, get to vote for their leaders directly), but China the grand conglomeration of states-within-states remains a dictatorial union, and that's unlikely to change for a while.
No, as I say in BFA, the internal integration process in China will dwarf the country's external integration with the global economy.
When that integration process moves from building nets to running them, then watch the private sector demand more and more from the centeróin effect slowly pluralizing it over time.
Seriously, China will look an awful lot like South Korea politically in 20 years.
Hard to believe?
Hell, South Korea was a pretty dictatorial one-party state 20 years ago too. Now it's the number-one foreign investor in one several times its size.
I speak not of possibilities, but inevitabilities.