The China Syndrome

I'm borrowing this comment from streetlife.com -- it's too interesting to ignore:

"The New Face of Communist China….Last week I went to an event with Rui Chenggang, one of the top young TV news anchors in China who was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow in 2001 by the World Economic Forum, and is a 100% loyal Communist. Chenggang, who's all of 28 and incredibly articulate, is living in the states for the first time as part of the Yale World Fellows Program. He highlighted some amazing statistics— there are more people who speak English in China than there are in the U.S. —and noted some key misconceptions. We westerners associate China with a fire-breathing dragon, but in fact the icon we see as a dragon, the Chinese see as a benevolent water-breathing serpent that cares for crops. When I asked about the fact that China is growing so fast that there may not be enough natural resources to sustain it, Chenggang was cagey—he insisted that China is working on alternative fuel sources and that the government is much more focused on environmental preservation than the U.S. acknowledges. That's a tough one to swallow." Julie Boorstein