But the Chinese will have their turn. They've had it before as the regional "superpower" in pre-modern times -- ask the Koreans, Vietnamese, hell, as the Tibetans now.
There is an interesting piece in the current NYRB on the current complex Chinese attitude towards the west of humiliation, admiration, and contempt. The piece reviews several books and a movie about the Chinese recent PhD who shot several members of his diss committee, a perceived rival, and I think a dean at the U of Iowa in the early '90s. Needless to say any generalization about Chinese (American, etc.) attitudes have only statistical validity. But the piece is worth reading.
Also in that issue is a review of the life of the great Western historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham, creator of the ongoing Science and Civilization In China series that has been coming out since the 1950s, and his collaborators, including his partner Lu Gwai-Jen. S&CiC is one of the great scholarly achievements of the ages. Needham and Lu were both unreconstructed Marxists, btw, and S&CiC reflects this. Its results go some ways to helping explain the attitude mentioned in the previous paragraph: millennia of brilliant achievement far above anything "the West" (which didn't exist, Christiandom if you will, or Europe, which also didn't exist, since S&CiC starts long before AD) could show, then eclipse, followed by defeat and colonization.
My wife worked at Needham's institute in Cambridge and studied with Dr. Lu in the early 1980s, when she was working on the history of Chinese medicine. What I mainly remember about them is Dr Lu was very very short, ramrod straight, and extremely fierce in a quiet sort of way, while Needham was very tall, genial, polite, and indefatiguable.
--- On Sat, 8/9/08, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Olympics
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008, 7:38 PM
> On Aug 9, 2008, at 8:26 PM, John Thornton wrote:
>
> >> Their sense of superiority is frightening. Ours is
> just one of
> >> those funny quirks you just shrug off.
> >>
> >> Doug
> >
> >
> > I don't know.
> > I suspect more of the world is "frightened"
> by America's sense of
> > superiority than China's but maybe I'm wrong
> about that.
>
> I was joking. Americans' sense of superiority has done
> much more
> damage to the world than China's. Maybe China will have
> its turn,
> though.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk