Friedman is by no means a starry-eyed apologist for China. He is the author of the prize-winning bestseller, “The World Is Flat,” and the New York Times foreign affairs columnist. He was obviously shaken by the Beijing Olympics, and couldn’t help musing on the future of his own country in light of that dazzling evening in Beijing.

It was rather strange to note that most of Taiwan’s journalists covering the Games did not feel the same impact as Friedman did. The exclamation, “we were so cooked” (meaning we are finished in Chinese), should have been the reaction from Taiwanese journalists. Instead, we have read a lot of stories from Beijing complaining about the host country’s “bullying” (daya) of Taiwan’s athletes in a number of indirect ways.

In the absence of ruminations from our own journalists, Friedman’s reflections perhaps were helpful for us to take a look at ourselves. His thoughts could be summarized in a few simple words: If the Americans want to rebuild their country, they have to go to China to see the future.

If Friedman truly felt this way, what should we in Taiwan do? Few people here see it that way, unfortunately. Most of us believed the opposite is true. The mainlanders should come here to see the famous “Taiwan Miracle” instead.

That might have been true a decade or two ago, when the people here worked hard with a single purpose: To build a strong economy and a prosperous and just society. But no longer. For most of the past two decades, Taiwan’s people have shifted their focus from the economy to politics — divisive identity politics that have torn the island apart.

It’s interesting to compare Friedman’s observation of China and the United States with what has transpired in Taiwan over the past seven years. In 2001, China was awarded the right to host the 2008 Olympics. In the same year, al-Qaida attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. A year before that, Taiwan’s newly-elected president, Chen Shui-bian, suspended the construction of a fourth nuclear plant for ideological reasons, signaling the decline of the economy.

What a difference could seven years make? In China, since 2001, it invested US$43 billion to prepare for the Olympics, building new subways, airports, railways, venues and parks so modern and advanced that they made the United States look like a Third World country, at least in the “rich parts of China.”

The United States spent the seven years building “better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.” Infrastructural projects were either suspended or delayed by Bush’s misguided war on terror, which has already cost one trillion U.S. dollars, more than 20 times what Beijing spent on the summer games.

Subscribe to The China Post and save.  Click hereSharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Enter your comments - 800 characters max

Receive China Post promos

Respond to this email