Locating China in history: 4 new data points

■"Rape in China: A Nightmare For 26 Pupils," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 21 June 2005, p. A1.

■"Chinese Furniture Is In Such Demand, No Widow Is Safe: Men Rudely Enter Homes And Induce Folks to Sell; 'More Wolves Than Meat,'" by Karen Mazurkewich, Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2005, p. A1.

■"Chinese Bank Takes Lead In Privatizing: Stake by U.S. Bank Is Seen as First Step," by David Barboza, New York Times, 18 June 2005, p. B3.

■"China's New Frontiers: Tests of Democracy and Dissent," by Howard D. French, New York Times, 19 June 2005, p. A6.

Yet another of my continuing efforts to locate China in past U.S. history.

The first story of the frighteningly arbitrary power of teachers in poor rural areas in China has an almost Dickensian quality to it. It's "Oliver" in the worst way, proving that China the coastal regions may be approaching a U.S.-like economic standard, but that there's still a vast sea of inland population that's stuck in Appalachia-like impoverishment, at best dating them in the range of 1920s America. China will go majority urban around 2020, roughly a century after the U.S. did. Expect a huge amount of political change to catch up with all that social change in that timeframe.

The whole mania for scrounging up antique Chinese furniture so it can be sold abroad speaks to an extreme compression of time in China: a super-connecting economy finds buyers for the household goods of the most disconnected (typically) rural poor. It's like these "raiders of the lost folk art" are pillaging the country's past in real time, able as they are to travel back in time simply by visiting the countryside and preying upon the elderly there.

But China is also moving smartly into the present, showing more and more signs that the government realizes that the best way to reform banking is to have foreign banks buy into the system, bringing their "new" rules (at least to the Chinese bankers) and their old money to help transition the industry from the bad practices (and bad loans) of the past. This simultaneously feels like the rise of better banking practices in the U.S. during the Great Depression and the raging bank mergers of more recent years.

And the final story has an almost 1970s California ring to it, as political decision making is increasingly devolving to local governments on economic development issues, and politicians there are likewise turning to almost "proposition"-like polling methods to sound out the public on how to move ahead. These politicians don't do it because they want to per se, but because they've seen too many provinces succumb to angry mob violence when the local population's desires are routinely ignored by secretive and elitist government-decides-all methods of economic planning. I mean, in one instance we're talking about a local Communist Party official bringing in a Stanford political scientist to oversee focus groups.