Sept. 24, 2008: 六大盟友拒绝救美国 – Six big allies refuse to rescue America

Everyday I wake up eat a banana, make a mug of instant coffee, and turn on my computer.  Lately the American news I read online has gotten steadily worse, as I’m sure you all know.  While I was finishing up high school America was going to war, by the time I graduated college the sub-prime mortgage debacle had gotten into full swing and now while staring my first job post-college the whole financial system of America is struggling through the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.  This is not what any American twenty-two year old wants to be seeing after college.  The American dream and a prosperous life just got placed that much farther away from me.  But there is a catch: I’m in China.

I’m living and working far away from Wall Street and Washington in a country where they just lowered interest rates so that China’s annual GDP growth rate could stay in the double digits.  I’m in a country where construction is taking place at a dizzying pace, where children are given a competitive education so that they call all find jobs in new fields that didn’t exist ten years ago.  Everything here is looking up.  Don’t get me wrong, China is feeling the pinch because of the worldwide crisis, but they’re not that worried.  Premier Wen Jia Bao (温家宝) said a week ago:

Overall, the economy is developing in line with our macroeconomic control measures. The negative impact of the global economy and major natural disasters have not changed the basic situation of our economy, and we have achieved stable growth.

I’m beginning to think that China is actually glad to see the U.S. flounder in its financial crisis because it could mean an end to the U.S. being a leader in world economics.  A Chinese article that was spread all over the world’s news agencies testifies to this fact.  The article, Is the sun setting on US economic supremacy?, was published in the China Daily, the main English language news outlet for the Chinese state.  The author of the article is “a researcher with the State Council Development Research Center.”  It began:

The unfolding financial crisis in the United States leads us to wonder whether this signals the end of that country’s long-established financial hegemony in the world.

I love China and hope to continue to work in China.  However, I did not leave the U.S. because I saw it as a sinking ship (President Bush’s idiocacy did help me get out the door though) and I don’t want China to become the world’s biggest financial superpower.  I came to China because we live in a globalized world where a young American man can succeed in Boston, Beijing, or any number of cities across the globe.  Right now though these recent developments have spooked me and I’m worried that my future won’t be as rosy as my childhood of the 1980s and 1990s.  So maybe learning Mandarin and coming to China was in fact the smartest thing I could have done.  Maybe the rosy future I’m looking for can’t be found in America.  I hope this isn’t true and I hope Obama wins the Presidential election because, frankly, I’m tired of this shit.