About fifteen years ago my family had a couple of Chinese exchange students stay for a month. One of their favourite topics at tea time was the decline of the West and the inevitable rise of China. 'Your time has passed, ours has come,' was the gist of it.
With the West's decline into an onanistic fever of irrelevances accelerating daily the intervening few years will have done little to change the minds of our CCP-endorsed visitors.
The recent appearance of a Chinese 'weather balloon' - a meme doing the rounds had it daubed with 'Weather Barroon (Totary NOT For Spying)' – will have only added to such perceptions.
Despite not looking like an ordinary weather balloon, instead looking like a 'high-altitude surveillance device' according to some, the United States government, which fights tooth and nail over issues of gender identity, racial grievances and unfounded rumours of 'Russian disinformation' let the sky-high visitor from Beijing float unimpeded across the country.
What the device hoped to gain materially is uncertain. Considering the extent of China's influence across the economies and political structures of the West, the Chinese probably wouldn't have to bother with a giant, plain-to-see balloon in order to get any information they were after.
Perhaps it was, as they claim, just a balloon that they lost control of. Either way, it handily tested the Americans' mettle and showed it lacking once again, as the Yanks failed to blow it out the sky before it reached the continental United States.
A more confident America may have done so, a fact which China, rapaciously eyeing up the poor island of Taiwan, will surely keep in mind. Add to that the West's obsession with Ukraine, sapping its strength on an Eastern European border dispute of little actual interest to anyone but Kiev and Moscow, and the lot of the happy emperor in Peking keeps only improving.
I wonder if those exchange students factored in the upheaval in their society due to the gender imbalance caused by the one child policy. It will have an effect. Having spent some 10 days with a party of middle class Chinese about 8 years ago, all of whom were the only child, their sense of entitlement and narcissism was an uncomfortable display. The men behaved like teenage boys with their petulance and demands and their wives were forced into a maternal soothing role. Goodness knows what the men who haven’t been able to find a partner will behave when their mothers are no longer alive.
Seen “American Factory” on Netflix yet?
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81090071?s=i&trkid=13747225&vlang=en&clip=81135485
This documentary is well worth watching: a Chinese billionaire buys up a defunct factory in Rust Belt Ohio.
Chinese management culture meets American workforce with interesting results.