On April 24, 2010, I attended a panel at the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The topic was “China: The Next Superpower?” The experts were Richard Baum, author of China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom; Zachary Karabell, Superfusion, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Baum is an expert on politics; Karabell on money/economics, and Wasserstrom on history.
Wasserstrom said that China is not the older country. The PRC was sixty-years old while the United States was more than two hundred.
Both the Communist Civil War and the American Revolution rejected colonialism then both expanded into other countries and territories to become world powers.
Richard Baum
Baum added that the cultural differences are significant starting with Confucianism, which expresses Collective Rights instead of individual rights as in America.
Karabell mentioned that there was a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance between the United States and China.
Zachary Karabell
Many in the US believe China is unfair in world trade and that Americans lose jobs because of that.
However, China’s trade with the world is about even between exports and imports and what China buys from the United States keeps many Americans working.
______________
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.
Note: This post first appeared on iLook China April 30, 2010 as post # 278. This revised version reappears as post # 1084.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 