China to USA: you ate too many hamburgers.

Har har har




Too Many Hamburgers?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 21, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/opinion/22friedman.html?src=me&ref=general

To visit China today as an American is to compare and to be compared.

And from the very opening session of this year’s World Economic Forum here in Tianjin, our Chinese hosts did not hesitate to do some comparing.

China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children — one wearing the Chinese flag, another the American, another the Indian, and another the Brazilian — getting ready to run a race.

Before they take off, the American child, “Anthony,” boasts that he will win “because I always win,” and he jumps out to a big lead. But soon Anthony doubles over with cramps. “Now is our chance to overtake him for the first time!” shouts the Chinese child. “What’s wrong with Anthony?” asks another. “He is overweight and flabby,” says another child. “He ate too many hamburgers.”

For the U.S. visitor, the comparisons start from the moment one departs Beijing’s South Station, a giant space-age building, and boards the bullet train to Tianjin.

It takes just 25 minutes to make the 75-mile trip. In Tianjin, one arrives at another ultramodern train station — where, unlike New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, all the escalators actually work.

“How can you compete with a country that is run like a company?” an Indian entrepreneur at the forum asked me of China.

“We are not ready to act on our strength,” said my Indian friend, “so we’re waiting for them [the Chinese] to fail on their weakness.”

Will they? The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty.

Yet China also has regular rotations of power at the top and a strong record of promoting on merit, so the average senior official is quite competent.

Listening to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China tick off growth statistics in his speech here had the feel of a soulless corporate earnings report. Yet he has detailed plans for his people’s betterment, from universities to high-speed rail, and he’s delivering on them.

 

are you posting from Shanghai? Get a real keyboard.....you post is not readable....

 

This can be remedied by simply clicking on the link provided and reading the article...

 

oops sorry i dont know why my encoding on the browser is always messed up

 

Friedman and Krugman both are on the Soros payroll.

Fat American tourist versus eleven year old girl in China working 16 hour days breathing heavy-metals laden smog while sewing Nike shoes for 28 cents per hour.

Here's a picture: Fat American, wearing those Nikes sewn with exploited Chinese child labor, suffers a massive heart attack because some Chinese peasant offered him one of his daughters for $5 because the peasant wanted to try for a son under the yoke of the Communist regime's family planning controls. But, the fat American is in luck, because he can get a brand new replacement heart courtesy of the Communist regime's involuntary prisoner organ donor program.

USA to China: thanks to you we can eat all the hamburgers we want.

 

Only underclass people in U.S. eat hamburgers.

 

The Chinese system is autocratic, rife with corruption and at odds with a knowledge economy, which requires liberty.
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What exactly can you do in this country without paying someone off?

Not exactly corruption per se but you have to ask permission to do anything and pay a required fee.

 

Campaign contribution, which has its uplimit removed in last year for corporations, and lobbying, are lawful bribery. People can bribe with impunity if you know how to get around the U.S. law.

 

So what do upperclass people eat? Burritos?

 

Veggieburgers