Chapter Sneak Peak: China's Generation Y

The following is an excerpt from the beginning of the book.

Welcome to the world of China's Generation Y! This is a world that has until now been relatively uninfluenced by the Western hand, a world where a bustling and burgeoning group of unknown, enthusiastic youth is growing and learning. This world is a place where buildings rise faster than they fall, and where technology spreads faster than in most other countries.

Western thought and bias previously precluded Americans from wanting to learn about this generation. We were taught to ignore China and its vast population, for each person was ostensibly designed as a servant to a hostile communistic state. There persisted an unfounded belief that China could never overtake the West.

However, strong indications from its freer market economy, vast population of highly educated employees, and other indications from its new generation of Chinese youth- who are more accepting of foreigners-all point to China's advances on its path to becoming a world superpower.

The Growing Superpower

For most Americans, accepting China as a potential superpower is a tough cookie to chew on, for it ostensibly marks a period of declining American hegemony around the world. Unbeknownst to many Americans, their country has lost most of its competitive industries to foreign countries. It has lost electronics, information technology, manufacturing, aerospace, and, in most cases, luxury goods to countries like Japan and China.

The United States is left with car manufacturing, entertainment, pharmaceutical and manufacturing technology, Wal-Mart, and highly inflated real estate. While America loses the industries it championed as its key to superpower status, China rapidly incubates these industries with its vast population of low-paid, educated workers and now more relaxed market-entry laws.

Whereas the American middle class is pressed for money as a result of rising expenditures from the grocery bill all the way to college education- a new middle class in China flourishes, resembling the products of the socio-economic changes in America during the 1950s.

While America worried about homosexuals on television and fomented a sanctimonious battle to save the country from liberals, China consistently grew its economy on average by 20 percent for the past twenty years, though some economists find the true rate of growth in 2003 to be around 13 percent. It did so while maintaining a revenue surplus of approximately $500 billion, in contrast to America's trillion upon trillion-dollar deficits that have caused the dollar to plummet, as it will continue to do for several more years. In fact, China's economy was so hot that its central bank needed to slow growth by raising interest rates in order to stop inflation.

China is currently undergoing a renaissance relative to the "dark ages" of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Economy, religion, culture, society, education, and living conditions are all flourishing, causing massive social and political changes in a country that completely rebuked such influences two and one- half decades ago. Likewise, the youth in China during this renaissance are being molded increasingly by the flourishing Western influences that are pervading their country. Ironically, these individuals were born amidst rapid change and confusion, but they are the vehicles that will take China into an optimistic future immersed in technology, consumerism, and economic prosperity it has not seen for centuries.

Yet a large number of Americans still have their heads in the sand. America's longstanding preconception of 1.3 billion people toiling on fields of rice patties neglects the optimistic reality of a growing and extremely motivated capitalistic bourgeoisie in China's urban areas. Others contend that the economic growth will be short-lived, similar to South Korea's lack of momentum in intense development. China, however, differs from South Korea in several significant ways. China has a huge workforce and a massive young population that speak English.

China is dedicated to its expansion by allowing gold to be acquired, adjusting interest rates, and adapting its political and economic doctrine by entering in the World Trade Organization (WTO). China has, in the past several decades, made strategic decisions about its development.

Unlike Western democracies, China can brutally crush dissent in problematic areas without receiving massive protests from the international community. In effect, the international community has resigned itself to China's administration; shunning China would be an economic nightmare for any nation that makes a clamor about human rights violations.

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