Panda-monium on 10.10

Sichuan visitors visit the Chengdu Research Base of Panda Breeding more than the varied gastronomic offerings of the province in the city it is named after. The spicy Sichuan cuisine’s worldwide reputation cannot match the visitors’ desire to see the cuddly bears, now in protective custody numbering more than a hundred. Sixteen cubs were displayed February last year; 12 recently born cubs were in sight the last seven-days of China’s national holiday.

It is, perhaps, a measure of the awareness of the New China (Xinhua) that last week’s visitors to the research station were overwhelmingly local.  All told, 10,000 visitors went through the till daily from all over the country. It normally accommodates from 2,000 to 3,000 on a normal day.

Today, Xinhua commemorates the centennial of the Xinhai (1911 in the 60-cycle Chinese calendar) Revolution that propelled it into the global stage.  It was by the Yangtze River (aka Chiang Jiang) in Wuchang that reformist in the Qing dynasty tried to establish a modern armament industry for a New Army.

It was too late.  German’s were already drinking beer in Wuhan, and the Bund park in Shanghai was reportedly off limits to dogs and Chinese! Imperial powers including Nippon were already carving out Napoleon’s sleeping Tiger with the French themselves encroaching from Yue Nan (Vietnam).

The nationalist Sun Yat Sen of the Tongmenghui (Chinese Revolutionary Alliance) was at the time promoting new thinking, influencing the junior officers of the new army to forego the more than 2,000 years of imperial feudal system and replace it with republican notions (res publica, public ownership of properties) that swept the American revolution (“certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and the French Fourth Republic’s virtues of equalite, egalite, fraternite.

An accidental explosion occurred while the cadets were producing bombs for a projected insurrection scheduled for October 10 but the provincial authorities failed to react quickly and decisively; reformist soldiers proceeded with the uprising that got southern provinces to declare independence from imperial Beijing, led to the Manchu throne abdication and the eventual end of China’s dynastic reign.

Revolutions are never cleanly planned as they are weirdly bungled into, and the image of the Red Guard raised fists quoting Chairman Mao Zedong’s sayings and singing the East is Red that has alarmed western minds and teased the exuberance of its youth, has since been replaced by the picture of the Pandas frolicking in Washington’s national zoo that followed the incidental ping-pong diplomacy.

To no small measure from recently departed Apple’s Steve Jobs genius in digital graphics did the picture of the animated Kung Fu Panda come to the global imagination.  Intended as a parody of a bumbling humanoid named Po, the clumsy and rotund noodle cook who longed to be a Kung Fu master propels himself by fireworks to an arena where he is surprisingly fingered as a “chosen one”.  His tenacity, culinary skill and good humor endears him to his detractors, and has DreamWorks/Paramount Pictures laughing their way to the bank.

The world today looks at the New China as a financial Kung Fu master expected to bail out all kinds of national economies in rapid decline from naive, corrupt, gratuitous and criminal indiscretions.  The practical Premier Hu Jintao and President Wen Jiabao steer the course of the State, but the great Panda forest of Zhongguo itself is not devoid of the illusion that bedevils the global economic basis: the reliance on the numerical paper value of assets that is the result of speculation and phantom valuation.

Satellite photos of “ghost cities” in China emerged last year; 64 million unoccupied units are in the market, carried in ledgers as assets though non-performing. China’s skyline is dotted with unfinished construction. The real estate bubble would have burst with the rest of the free market economies were it not for a centralized governance that countered with massive government expenditures to fuel the local economy.

The ¥rmb has already appreciated by 7 percent to the U$ dollar this year, and Proctor and Gamble does not hesitate to raise its prices in a domestic market that buys its toothpastes, has Bud as the best selling beer, and Tide as the detergent of choice. Only $4 of the $284 China-assembled Apple iPod is retained in country. The global economy in recession is on paper, and nations dependent on financial incomes are the hardest hit.

As Main Street paid for Wall Streets indiscretions, China’s street market is paying for the greed and ostentatious wealth of the bourses and the indexes that bank the government’s securities and bonds.  The burst of a real estate bubble is more devastating than any typhoon, tremor, tsunami, or tornado anywhere in the world. Kung Fu Panda Po’s agile footwork is called upon as the U.S. blame game is heating up this election year on China’s doorsteps.

Time to launch the Xinmou (2011) Revolution!