Until recently, I didn’t know what the BRIC was. Now, because I spend so much time researching topics about China, I often run into the BRIC.
The BRIC is Brazil, Russia, India and China. In the next few decades, these countries could become the wealthiest nations on the globe alongside America.
Jim O’Neill, who works for Goldman Sachs, talks about the BRIC in the embedded video.
In fact, O’Neill is the one who thought up the acronym for BRIC.
When he stepped into his position at Goldman Sacs, he wanted to know how the world might change economically by 2050.
They discovered that China would become the world’s largest economy before 2050 possibly reaching 45 trillion dollars–twenty times larger than today, and the rest of the BRIC economies would have a much larger share of the global economy too.
Projections also show that India, Russia and Brazil would become larger than the current G7 bypassing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.
Only the US would remain in the top five.
If you are a doubter, consider that the BRIC economies are already having a huge influence on the world, and the potential growth of the middle class in the BRICs could explode four hundred percent in the next decade, which would increase demand for cars, energy and oil.
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.
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Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
Unlike India, China’s one party political system allows for quick decisions that often benefit the country.
Another important factor to remember is that China is still a collectivist nation as India is.
Due to this fact, China and India have more in common than India and America.
It does not matter that India is considered the world’s largest democracy, because to counter that, India also has a large bureaucracy that makes it difficult to get things done.
However, in India, the bureaucracy has a reputation for being tremendously arrogant. It is a truism that Indian bureaucrats are generally smug and supercilious… source: Open India
Indian bureaucracy has often been criticized for being cumbersome and stretching procedures to sanction projects. Source: Meri News
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
A friend, Tom Carter, while shooting his next book in India, discovered that it was easier to travel and stay in China than India.
A study of Individualist and collectivist orientations across occupational groups in India by Anjali Ghosh where he refers to a study by Sinha & Verma (1994) … that master’s-level students express more idiocentric (individualist) orientations than allocentric (collectivist) due to Western influence, immediate life concerns and exposure to mass media.
However, Verma & Triandis (1999) observed that Indian students were more vertical collectivist than U.S. students were.
Another fact is that China and India both have ancient civilizations more than 5,000 years old and they are next-door neighbors as Canada and the US are.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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There appears to be an obsession in the West that India, since it is a democracy, is the country that will counter China’s economic and military growth.
The American Interest published a piece in their May/June 2010 issue – The Return of the Raj, which points out that where G. W. Bush failed to build an Indo-U.S. defense pact, Secretary of State Clinton in a visit to India in July 2009 did open the door to significant arms transfers from the U.S. to India.
If the United States and India can together rediscover and revive the Indian military’s expeditionary tradition, they will have a solid basis for strategic cooperation not only between themselves but also with the rest of the world’s democracies. Source: The American Interest
In another piece, A Himalayan rivalry, The Economist focuses on the 1962 conflict between India and China saying, “Memoires of a war between India and China are still vivid in the Tawang valley…”
However, memoires aren’t everything. There is also knowledge, and China is not the same country it was in 1962.
In 1962, some of the factors that led to the war between India and China were linked to Mao’s policies, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Maoists were removed from power in the 1980s, and China is not a socialist nation as it was then.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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I mentioned Hsuan-tsang (Xuanzang) when I wrote about China’s Three “Journey’s to the West”. However, in that post I did not go into detail about the real Buddhist monk who made the journey.
While doing some research about his life, I discovered an intellectual discussion at Philosophy and Marxism Today. If this topic interests you and you want to learn more about Buddhism I recommend reading this conversation between Thomas Riggins and Fred.
Thomas starts with, “I’ll start with background based on Chan’s introductory remarks.
“Hsuan-tsang (596-644) was quite a character. He entered a Buddhist monastery when he was thirteen. Then moved around China studying under different masters. Finally, he went off to India to study Buddhism at its source and with Sanskrit masters.
“He spent over ten years in India, wrote a famous book about his journey, and returned to China with over six hundred original manuscripts.
“He spent the rest of his life with a group of translators rendering seventy five of the most important works into Chinese. All of this work was sponsored by the Emperor of the newly established T’ang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).”
The book I have on Hsuan-tsang says he lived from 602 to 664 AD.
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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.
I find it interesting and amusing to read this obsession in the West about China’s labor practices. Most of what I read in the media and comments to Blog posts have a superior tone as if these people come from a culture that is paradigm of virtue.
No one in the West has earned a seat to sainthood. In an Associated Press piece by Elaine Kurtenbach, we see Western corporate greed dripping dollar signs from hungry vampire fangs in these quotes about China, “Many companies are striving to stay profitable by shifting factories to cheaper areas farther inland or to other developing countries, and a few are even resuming production in the West.… I have 15 major clients. My job is to give the best advice I can give. I tell it like it is. I tell them, put your helmet on, it’s going to get ugly,” said Goodwin…”
From BindApple.com comes this statement as if no one else in the world works these hours, “Foxconn and Inventec are two powerful brands that not many of you heard of. When Apple signed a partnership with these manufacturers, the average worker, lived and worked in the factory, doing more than 60 hours of work in a week.”
America and most Western nations are not paradigms of virtue. Labor in the West didn’t get where it is today without a struggle. All one has to do is look at history to discover what it took to earn more for less hours and be treated with “some” respect in the workplace.
If you spend time at the AFL-CIA’s Labor History Timeline in America, you will discover that in 1791, the first labor strike in the building trades took place in Philadelphia demanding a 10-hour workday bill of rights. In 1835, there was a general strike for a 10-hour workday in the same city.
When there was a national uprising of railroad workers in 1877, ten Irish coal miners were hanged in Pennsylvania and later nine more were hanged. Then in 1914, there was the Ludlow Massacre of 13 women and children and 7 men in a Colorado coal miners’ strike. In 1934, during the Great Depression, there was an upsurge in strikes, including a national textile strike, which failed.
Click on the Child Labor Public Education Project and you will learn that “Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history.” In fact, “(American) factory owners viewed them (children) as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike.”
This situation in the US didn’t change until, “Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor.” Even then, it wasn’t until 1938 that child labor laws were enacted to protect America’s children from exploitation.
So, if you are one of those paradigms of virtue who feels the need to criticize what is going on in China today, consider America’s labor history before you open your mouth or finger dance your computer keyboard.
It took more than two-hundred years for the US to reach the place it is today with a standard 40-hour workweek with benefits and overtime pay for many workers, while removing child labor from the workplace.
China didn’t start until 1950, when Mao created laws that made women equal to men. Progress stopped during Mao’sGreat Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, which went on for almost thirty years.
Since 1980, China has had about thirty years to evolve, while in America the income gap between the rich and poor widens as if the US is taking backward steps while union membership shrinks.
In fact, Chinese manufactures may be building plants in the US to take advantage of cheaper labor. After all, Japanese companies like Toyota and Honda have already done that.
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.
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