Opinion / You Nuo
Needed: a series on the fall of big powers
By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-01-15 06:30
As New Year's Day was approaching, many Chinese were engaged in some
supposedly important thinking while watching the television documentary
series The Rise of Big Powers.
The DVDs and manuscripts of the series, printed as a series of books, are
among China's bestsellers.
The purpose of the series was obvious: Now that the nation has become a
major global trading power and a key partner in many international
businesses, it is about time for the Chinese people to think about, not
just dream about, their role in the world.
In fact, some think-tank researchers have been talking about China's
peaceful rise for the last few years.
The series' producers and writers did not need a lot of political
background to conceptualize the documentary. They just had to share their
potential viewers' rising sense of patriotism and sense of success in
development.
It is always good for people to take the time to learn about others'
experiences and think about what they can do for the world besides
building ever larger houses and buying ever more things for themselves.
And needless to say, China's rise in economic power in the last three
decades has been achieved by hard work in a largely peaceful process,
which its people deserve to be proud of.
However, three decades are just a short period of time. China's
development must last for a long time before it can substantially improve
the general welfare of its people. And the rebuilding of such a colossal
country is bound to involve many tasks rarely required in other countries.
There are plenty of cases in world history where big powers' rise was
interrupted by their own mistakes, from waging stupid wars to ignoring
environmental changes. China itself has many stories to tell about its
past dynastic ups and downs.
Rather than presenting their viewers with a series on the rise of big
powers, Chinese television programmers would do better to produce a
series showing how some nations' big-power dreams were dashed, and how
others, after staying awhile in the world's club of big powers,
hopelessly collapsed, never managing to pull themselves together again.
A television series on the Fall of Big Powers may not appeal to the
general psychology of a rapidly developing nation. But it would give
people a much more valuable lesson, presenting them with the opportunity
to reflect on things to avoid when their nation is becoming more powerful
and things to do before it is too late.
To be sure, wasteful behavior in the name of development is one of the
most salient problems undermining China's quest for future importance.
The pompous buildings of government offices from Beijing all the way to
border towns exemplify how widespread the problem is.
Small wonder that the nation has failed to meet its energy saving
targets, among the few targets not yet met in China's development
program. But in the long run, China has no way to sustain its development
ambitions without effective ways to conserve natural resources.
Promoting frugality is therefore one of the things that China should
start doing now to curb its wasteful habits, especially those of its
officials. And this considered, government reform, particularly routing
out official corruption and checking officials' wasteful habits, is not
only a good thing for China but also an important service China can do
for the whole world.
(China Daily 01/15/2007 page4)
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