HaHaHa America
"Enjoy Fragrant Monkey Tail, HaHaHa!"
Here's a short film that was submitted to the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, appropriately titled HaHaHa America. The description of the film on the Sundance website is 'A translated harangue from China to the US that laughs at our misteps.' Subtitled with a faux Chinese narrator, the film juxtaposes scenes of booming Chinese industry against US sloth and corporate corruption. It's pretty amusing stuff. Although, much of the film is obviously tongue-in-cheek, I don't think the 'harangue' is too distant from one a nationalistic corporate Chinese elite would deliver to the US if suddenly stricken by a bout of honesty. There's actually a lot to chew on in that video.
The world is still waking up to the fact that within a few decades Asian powers will likely dominate economically, and will not be beholden or submissive to the West. Look at the figures on world manufacturing, economic growth, manpower, science and engineering graduates, debt and savings, foreign goodwill, military commitments, and then tell me the US is going to be the world's major power half a century from now with a straight face. By the way, that picture to above isn't some scene out of Bladerunner, it's the skyline of Shanghai ;-)
posted by Wise G at Wednesday, April 05, 2006
2 Comments:
Wow, this kind of capitalist success story really brings a tear to my eye. Economists have been saying for years that the Chinese economy will soon be the largest in the world, so I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t already know that. So far the manufacturing jobs and service sector jobs that have gone to Asia are only very small portions of what’s to come. It’s unclear as to how or if the American economy will actually adjust to these changes. The ‘experts’ assure us it will, but I find there explanation of how rather disconcerting. One suggestion, given by Alan Bilder in the March/April 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs, is that American jobs will migrate to service jobs which cannot be “electronically transferred” (i.e. Wal-Mart Door Greeter).
I did have to laugh at the producer’s “armchair economics” though. The trade deficit is probably the least understood concept in all of economics.
Hilarious. Unfortunately there's a lot of truth in there. If I'm correct, I heard China made up over 30% of the world's economic growth last year.
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