THE BLOG of John Gelles
August 8, 2008
RED CHINA GOES FOR BROKE
THE GREATEST SHOW EVER ON EARTHYou may remember the Japanese American regimental combat teams who fought against Germany in Italy toward the end of WW II. In the movie of their heroism, their motto was GO FOR BROKE !.
Tonight Red China will show another way to go for broke -- in a 45 billion dollar dollar extravaganza -- forecast by observers of its dress rehearsals to be THE GREATEST SHOW EVER ON EARTH.
President Bush will be there -- along with his father, the honorary captain of the American team. The President politely from outside China expressed his wish for individual Chinese people to live more like Americans --with more freedom and possibly fewer extravagant shows of what a command economy can do while we were borrowing its money.
I'll be watching with you. I expect to have mixed emotions. I was in China last in 1945 and 1946, to land American Marines near Tientsin, and return Japanese occupiers to Nagasaki. China has come a long way from that time. And America has gone a long way too.
I wish the Chinese had put that 45 billion dollars into a housing system that would have taught all underpaid Chinese how to build homes for themselves. Starting at the Great Wall, they would be building in a vast rural space beautiful middle class homes, until the 1.3 billion Chinese showed the rest of world how to do it.
I guess the President and I both have wishes. The Chinese Communist Party had plans. Tonight we will see the result --THE GREATEST SHOW EVER ON EARTH.
Tomorrow we will see the hundreds of millions of homes the people of China deserve if they build them.
And they will be as free to participate in Government as are the people of any great nation.
They will have GONE FOR BROKE as their Japanese American allies did in WW II -- while people in search of freedom were allied to kill (or free) an enemy whose 1936 Olympics forecast a different story.