Posted by
MAXINE on Thursday, August 21, 2008 6:48:29 PM
By March or April 2008, the 6000 gold, silver and bronze medals for Beijing 2008 were ready. China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation in Shanghai, China, was the maker of the medals. /// The raw materials for creating the medals came from BHP’s mines in Chile and Australia. Escondida mine in Chile provides the copper concentrate which contains gold for the gold medals. Spence mining operation, also in Chile, supplies copper cathode which can turn into bronze medals. Cannington mine in Queensland, Australia, supplies silver and lead for crafting silver medals. Image Credit: beijingolympicsfan.com
The Audacity Of Liberal Defeatist Attitudes
In an op-ed piece written by
New York Times columnist,
Nicholas D. Kristof, we are treated to a
world view of praise for the potential growth of China as a country that will own the successes found in the advancement of humanity for the 21st Century.
He sites as part of his arguments … the flexibility of this centralized, totalitarian rule which by its very nature, is inflexible.
Ask the people who traveled to Beijing to see the Olympics … who hold their faith and the book that helps to inform them of their faith in high regard, how flexible the Government of China is after the flexible Government of China stripped them of their Bibles.
He goes on to extol the virtues of a winning China in the Olympics and then lectures us Americans to “Get Used To It”!
The trouble Mr. Kristof has with his analogies and trek through the history of man and his societies is the recognition of the power of the very real flexibility of a government system based on human rights and personal freedom.
Further, he ignores the conservative and competitive spirit of Americans who never assume that they are in the game … any game, to play for Bronze, or Silver – we all play for Gold.
We, at MAXINE just love it when we are lectured by liberals to just accept a future world view that does not have the United States continuing to win … and win big.
"Tank man" blocks a column of tanks heading east on Beijing's Chang'an Boulevard (Avenue of Eternal Peace) near Tiananmen Square during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Image Credit: Jeff Widener - 1989 (The Associated Press)
This excerpted and edited from the New York Times -
China’s Rise Goes Beyond Gold Medals
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - Published: August 20, 2008
China is on track to displace the United States as the winner of the most Olympic gold medals this year. Get used to it.
Today, it’s the athletic surge that dazzles us, but China will leave a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in business, in science, in education.
The world we are familiar with, dominated by America and Europe, is a historical anomaly. Until the 1400s, the largest economies in the world were China and India, and forecasters then might have assumed that they would be the ones to colonize the Americas — meaning that by all rights this newspaper should be printed in Chinese or perhaps Hindi.
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Now the world is reverting to its normal state — a powerful Asia — and we will have to adjust. Just as many Americans know their red wines and easily distinguish a Manet from a Monet, our children will become connoisseurs of pu-er tea and will know the difference between guanxi and Guangxi, the Qin and the Qing. When angry, they may even insult each other as “turtle’s eggs.”
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This transition to Chinese dominance will be a difficult process for the entire international community, made more so by China’s prickly nationalism. China still sees the world through the prism of guochi, or national humiliation, and among some young Chinese success sometimes seems to have produced not so much national self-confidence as cockiness.
China’s intelligence agencies are becoming more aggressive in targeting America, including corporate secrets, and the Chinese military is busily funding new efforts to poke holes in American military pre-eminence.
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Mr. Bush should have spoken out more forcefully on behalf of human rights, including urging Beijing to stop shipping the weapons used for genocide in Darfur.
It’s a difficult balance to get right, but China’s determination to top the gold medal charts — bespeaks a larger desire for international respect and legitimacy. We can use that desire also to shame and coax better behavior out of China’s leaders.
When the Chinese government sentences two frail women in their late 70s to labor camp because they applied to hold a legal protest during the Olympics, as it just has, then that is an outrage to be addressed not by “silent diplomacy” but by pointing it out.
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On this visit, I dropped by the home of Bao Tong, a former senior Communist Party official who spent seven years in prison for challenging the hard-liners during the Tiananmen democracy movement. The guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials.
Mr. Bao noted that Communist leaders used to actually believe in Communism; now they simply believe in Communist Party rule. He recalled that hard-liners used to fret about the danger of “peaceful evolution,” meaning a gradual shift to a Western-style political and economic system. “Now, in fact, what we have is peaceful evolution,” he noted.
That flexibility is one of China’s great strengths, and it’s one reason that the most important thing going on in the world today is the rise of China — in the Olympics and in almost every other facet of life.
Reference Here>>
It is funny how being able to show “guards who monitor him 24/7 let me through when I showed my Olympic press credentials” as being a sign of Communist flexibility when this Communist (Bao Tong) Mr. Kristof is visiting is still under guard (house arrest) in his own country for speaking out about the lack of freedom and the adoption of Western style democracy and human-rights since 1989!
The economic base of China may be shifting to one more closely based on Capitalism (this does not mean we'll be seeing a similar outsize footprint in the arts, in science, in education) but the Government is still a central-rule Communist government where basic human-rights do not exist ... where is the outsized argument/demand for this "flexibility"?
