David Zach, futurist

China, Classical Music, Education & Real Futurists

I love stories about China and how they'll take over the world. Maybe they should. Police states are a bit of a bother, [Please watch the fascinating and frightening movie The Lives of Others.] but at least the Chinese parents seem to insist that their children gain some discipline and learn a lot more than just to feel good about themselves. This article in Asia Times addresses the question of China's Six to One Advantage with 36 million children learning piano compared to only 6 million here in the US. Perhaps they do have a few more people, but numbers are numbers and as a state entity they have this dominance which will go far beyond musical notes. 

Bruce Sterling said that Real futurists have children. This might be applied to those best prepared for strategic thinking and long-term planning as well. 

The Great (Information) Wall of China

It would seem that China can't quite keep a lid on the flow of information. Maybe (as Stewart Brand has said) information wants to be free, or at least not quite as unfree as a bunch of commie-capitalists would like it to be. More than that, people want to be free and that's probably where we should start. The Times of London article is cited on Tongue Tied explaining that despite China's best efforts, people keep finding away around the censors and this along with all sorts of other unexpected things keep messing with people's predictions for how China is going to take over the world.

They still might, but just not in the neatly paranoid scenarios that are so necessary in media, business and academia today.

Read David Wingrove's Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom: Book 1 (Chung Kuo) series on what the world will be like some 200 years in the future. Seven volumes of a well-crafted scenario of how China takes over the world. That would be a Confucian-styled China, by the way.

Let a 1000 txt msgs blm.