Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe; Part Twenty One.

   Before the Age of the Donald - Part 21.


    If the present Chinese government took away the number one powerful spot from the U.S., would the world be a better place? This is something that has to concern the Donald when he becomes U.S. president. It's hard to know how China will perform if it becomes the most powerful power on earth. Still China's past doesn't seem to encourage much hope.
     For centuries Chinese emperors ruled their peasant subjects with an iron hand. "The civilization of China," wrote Theodore White and Annallee Jacoby in the 1940's, "rested on the effective enslavement of the common man." And the common woman too.
    Under its communist ruler Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese government promised peasants and others that it would liberate them from the tyranny of the emperors. Yet under Mao's version of communism, most Chinese people saw only modest improvements in their lives. And many suffered terribly.
    Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950's killed over 25 million Chinese from starvation. Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' in the mid-1960's left one and a half million people dead and turned the lives of millions of other men and women completely upside down.
     "Religion is poison," Mao told the Tibetan Dalai Lama in the 1950's. Then Chinese troops killed about a million Tibetans. The Chinese army has also killed thousands of Moslems in the province of Xinjiang. The present day head of China, Xi Xinping, made it clear to the former Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd that he has no time for Western style democracy. Still,  Chinese people have made huge steps forward in the last forty years. According to recent reports over 600 million Chinese are now living a middle class lifestyle. Over 700 million Chinese people are still poor. Yet China's embrace of what some call 'State Capitalism' has enriched many Chinese citizens.
     China's treatment of its own people has improved in the past 40 years. Still, it is no model of democracy. So if the People's Republic of China becomes the number one power in the world there's no reason to believe that it will treat the rest of the world better than the United States has or Britain did or France.
    As the French say, "On verra." Or as we say in English, "We'll see."