Friday, October 2 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/business/economy/02yen.html?ref=global-home

Read an article in the news today talking about how China is going to soon overtake Japan as the second biggest economy in the world. Originally, people said it was going to happen in five years, but thanks to the financial crisis it’s probably going to be next year.

And the question of course was; what kind of tension is this going to cause between the two countries and inside Japan itself as it has to adjust to China being bigger and stronger.

What is this unholy obsession with ranks and being number one? Of course Japan and China have their own particular tensions (cough cough – World War II – cough cough), but in the end; of course China is going to overtake Japan. It has eight or nine times the country’s population. Japan isn’t going to tumble from the top of the heap; the top of the heap is simply getting bigger.

The Netherlands is unimportant in global affairs. We are wealthy and comfortable, but in the end there are only sixteen million of us. We as a country learned to handle that three hundred years ago. Back then Britain and France were top dog.

They have something like fifty or sixty million inhabitants, so now they are numbers five and six on the list of biggest economies. But they are still rich and their citizens are still doing well. Any loss of power was colonial power, which in itself was unsustainable and lopsided. The point here is pride, not power.

I suspect that this article, which appeared in the New York Times, was less of an interest piece about Japan than another expression of America’s fear of China. Of course there was a paragraph somewhere in the middle about how China is expected to pass the US in the year 2020.