I discovered this time-lapse video at zerohedge.com of a fifteen-story hotel being built in a few days in Changsha, a city in south-central China.
While watching, I thought of all that China has accomplished in more than two-thousand years that no other country or civilization has achieved.
There’s the amazing miracle the world has witnessed since the early 1980s as China rebuilt and reinvented itself from a medieval kingdom to a modern nation with the only maglev line in the world.
It is obvious that the Chinese don’t give up easily once they start something.
After all, the Chinese spent more than two thousand years building the Great Wall and about a thousand years building the Grand Canal.
The largest palace on the earth, the Forbidden City, is in Beijing and was built more than five hundred years ago.
The first emperor of China had a tomb and a Terra Cotta army built that makes the pyramids of Egypt seem insignificant.
Then there was the great fleet commanded by Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty.
In recent years, the Chinese announced they are going to build a space station, since the West won’t share theirs with China.
China has also said they are planning to build a colony on the moon, mine for rare earth metals and send a Chinese expedition to Mars within a few decades.
The Chinese recently proposed building a bullet train from Beijing to London while building thousands of kilometers of rail for bullet trains in China. America doesn’t have one bullet train yet.
Does anyone doubt the Chinese won’t accomplish these tasks once they have announced the goals?
No wonder the Western democracies want China to have a Western style democratic government.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
iLook China 
Good post and nice blog. I had to update mine after reading this one. Apparently I had fallen prey to bad information.
Thank you. You are correct that there is a lot of biased information on the Internet and in the Western media about China. It is easy to fall prey to this Sinophobia. Before my first trip to China in 1999, I was also a victim of the biased Western media and political scene in the US.
However, that situation is improving. If you are interested in learning more about the current political situation between China and the US, I suggest getting a copy of “The Economist” for December 4th-10th, 2010.
Although I have read a few biased pieces in “The Economist”, the last few issues have improved significantly in content over China and have been more accurate. Maybe they found a new correspondent with a better knowledge of China and replaced the old one. This week’s issue had a 14 page special feature on “The dangers of a rising China” and is worth reading.
I plan to write a review of this 14 page special soon but the review will be much shorter probably about 500 words.
“The Economist” is a weekly magazine/newspaper that was founded more than a century ago in the middle of the 1800s about the time of the Opium Wars. It would be interesting to get hold of old copies from back then and see what “The Economist” was writing about China at that time. Since this weekly magazine/newspaper is also offered on-line, maybe they will offer copies of the old issues one day.