The China syndrome

It was a movie in my youth (Jack Lemmon later received a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the tragic lead character). I did not understand why it was titled the China Syndrome then, but later I learned that the metaphor for a nuclear meltdown includes a boring through to the planet’s core, and since the antipode to the United States where the movie on a fictitious nuclear accident was set is China, ergo, the title.

We focus on today’s China, Obama’s whipping boy, distracting those lamenting the imminent physical end to our warmongering presence in the Middle East. We drool over the rich but critically unexploited Stans’ treasures of Central Asia but our famously ’socialist’ President abandons the gravy and feigns a warlike posture toward China.

China understands the art of facades, so Washington D.C.’s posturing is taken in stride, an understandable political necessity publicly staged but gingerly mentioned in serious foreign policy pronouncements.

The continuing sale of fighter planes to Taiwan is profitable for the U.S. military-industrial complex, and since the annual discretionary budget now claims 60 percent in military expenditures, maintaining commerce kin to the Department of Defense (previously named “Dept. of War”) is good for AmCham!

Anything Chinese seem of interest to Fox News, especially when the item is jaded, blowing it out of proportion to sizes usually accorded superstars.

Dating USC Trojan international graduate students Ying Wu and Ming Qu had the windshield of their BMW shattered by a bullet shortly after midnight in April in a botched carjack attempt.

USC in L.A. has the highest contingent of international students among U.S. schools of higher learning; 19 percent of the 38K students are foreign students, 2,500 from China. Heightened interest in the case is understandable, but now it has taken partisan tint.

Already, blogs bewail the “liberal” media’s indifference to the racial identity of Javier Bolden, 19, and Bryan Barnes, 20, (rumored to be of African-American descent) arrested Friday on suspicion of killing the students, comparing and contrasting George Zimmerman’s publicity for being allegedly a white supremacist in the Trayvon Martin case!

Then there is Chen Guangcheng, the blind civil rights lawyer who escaped Shandong Province and found welcome in Beijing’s U.S. Embassy compound, finally making it to NYC on a negotiated study leave with his wife and two children. His fame came from being pegged by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 influential persons of 2006. We are sympathetic to his cause, admire his tenacity and capability as a self-taught lawyer. It does not hurt to look like Tom Cruise in those shades! Can Hollywood be too far behind?

Already leery about being pigskin in political football, poor Chen found himself in the middle of one. Now to be tucked into a U.S. University fellowship, we do not expect to see Chen influence the practice of law in China anytime soon. But he will be high profile fodder for both the conservative and liberal press!

Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao’s efforts to expand the rule of law into all facets of China’s existence have a long way to go. Sadly, Mao’s revolution could not keep the recalcitrant cognoscenti from resurging for they rule the social strata of privilege. The world’s rarified oligarchy-1 percent of population owning 40 percent of the world’s wealth-is no consolation! Proletarians of the world will just stay poor!

The Wenzhou’s Wall Street debacle, once touted as a model of free enterprise after Deng Xiaopeng opened Zhongguo’s market gates, came as no surprise. This Zhejiang province center south of Shanghai, north of the notorious Fujian province (where the infamous Tongs caricatured in Fu Manchu movies still exist), traces its genesis to the 19th century when it raised capital for China’s industries.

Deng’s loosening of controls allowed it to manipulate capital’s supply and demand with some corrupt collusion in high places that fed frenzied growth, bottoming out when the global economic bubble burst in the same way as its Ponzi-like cousins worldwide.

Energetic 31-year-old Wu Ying started a hair saloon, engaged in rapid fund raising, and before long, her business empire included numerous shops and hotels. Three years ago, the questioned tycoon too green and too thinly protected to fend for herself, underwent legal accounting, and she earned a suspended capital judgment in court for blatantly bending the law, but her trial revealed a broader malaise that left Wenzhou dubbed as the land of disappearing bosses. Investors abandoned offices and factory managers just up-and-left their posts, leaving workers in unprofitable operations, unsellable inventories, and unmarketable services.

Already threatened by inflation, IMF cautions Beijing on its economic health. The global meltdown is hardly nuclear, but China remains the convenient whipping boy. Beijing so far has kept the Wenzhou bubble from bursting, particularly in overpriced housing. With the Wanda Dalian group getting into the global net with its recent acquisition of the AMC movie theaters, the Qu, Wu, Chen and Wu media show will be in the China Syndrome marquee awhile.