Chinese Pencil Pushers

      

Sometimes, when I'm relaxing, whether sitting by a crackling fire on a cold winter night or lazily swaying in a hammock on warm breezy days, I let my mind wander until I drift off, as it were, to a place where all of the cares and worries of this world are left behind. Unfortunately, there are those moments when the reverie is disrupted by thoughts about things that have absolutely nothing to do with my usual fantasy involving a bottle of bubbly and me chasing a couple of freshly scrubbed half naked geisha girls with silky smooth skin the color of plum blossoms around in the garden while beneath the glow of the Autumn moon. The disruptions to my daydreams and fantasies used to be worrisome thoughts about slow pay clients, a woodpecker that pecked holes the size of Little Richard's head in the side of my house, and a deranged garbage man who, perhaps intentionally, would virtually destroy perfectly good garbage cans within a month's time. But those thoughts that disrupted my reverie have been pushed aside by a new intruder called the "dollar store". Why is that? I wonder. Could it be because I am somehow concerned that 99.7% of everything that can be bought at a dollar store is made in China and that these stores are multiplying faster than a Chinese store clerk calculating profits on an abacus after drinking a pot of expresso coffee? Who's to say? I guess I can't help thinking about how the Chinese economy continues to churn out massive amounts of mass produced junk as its GNP soars into the stratosphere year after year while sustaining enormous trade imbalances with its trading partners. But then it all makes sense when one realizes the vast number of people that live in that "developing" country and how fundamentally easy it is for multi-national corporations to pay, in many cases, much less than 50 cents an hour to a veritable slave from an ever abundant labor pool of expendable workers in a country with no labor unions.

 

When the "evil empire" , or the U.S.S.R. (as it was more commonly known), came to an end, it must have made those Chinese bureaucrats more nervous than a cat on a hot tin roof to see Russia throw off the yokes of Communism for the excesses of Capitalism. The only reason why that happened, though, is because the  Communist status quo could no longer fool the proletariat by selling it promises in the form of a system which proclaims that all men are created equal (at least as far as the state is concerned). But as anyone with a modicum of intelligence will tell you, erudite proclamations often look good on paper, whereas the application of those sorts of things, well... that's a horse of a different color.

 

At any rate, at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chinese pencil pushers must have wondered if Russia would become a shining beacon of prosperity that the Chinese proletariat would take resentful notice of, but it never happened, and there's no doubt that the CPP (Chinese Pencil Pushers) were damn glad that it didn't, either. So while Russia's fledgling democracy went from no better than before to maybe even worse (economically speaking), the CPP watched, took notes, and eventually realized that by creating pockets of capitalism, or free market zoning, if you will, the CPP could have their cake and eat it too. In other words, they could gradually build a Capitalist economy, but only in select areas or "special economic zones" (SEZ), and yet still retain control over the people by never allowing them to vote or voice their opinions freely, either in a public setting or through the media. When you think about it, the Chinese bureaucracy (CPP) is damn clever. Since the seeds of a post-industrial revolution had been planted at Tianamen, though suppressed, it's not unreasonable to think that it wouldn't happen again in the near future. So the pencil pushers beat the revolutionaries to the punch, and now it's okay for folks to go shopping in China, which is what most people want to do, anyway. However, there's more to this picture than meets the eye...much more.