| | I was going to get one of my Chinese co-workers to show me the ideograms that would mean "red-haired face-eating Demon," so that I could use it as my identifier here, but I was too busy and forgot. Maybe tomorrow...
The L.A. Times recently ran a large, several page article on corruption in China. Note that I have feelings regarding this, but will carefully avoid mentioning them lest they somehow invalidate the facts and logic. According to the Times article, Chinese parents are essentially playing Russian Roulette every time they go to the supermarket to purchase baby food, as something on the order of 25% of the "Similac" type liquid milk substitute sold in large and small markets in China is nothing by dextrose, starch, and flavoring, packaged to look like and appear to be nutritious food.
Meanwhile, a flood of rich Westerners as well as neuvo-rich Chinese are buying new livers and kidneys and virtually every other body part at cut-rate prices, due to all the executions. The part that these people really need, of course, is a new brain, as there is no guarantee whatsoever that that kidney might not have come from someone with AIDS or hepatitus or malignant cancer, etc. Speaking of which, the ongoing AIDS epidemic in China was created by unscrupulous medical personnel pooling blood purchased from obvious drug addicts with all the other blood and then infecting tens of thousands with it.
Last year I read the xlnt best-selling "China, Inc.," in which the author heaps praise on China's incredible economic growth - or so it would seem to the casual reader. Anyone with more familiarity with Chinese culture would recognize when he words something very carefully to avoid killing his welcome in China while not outright lieing. For example, he discusses in passing the reported use of special regional dialects of Mandarin in order to perpetrate deception in business.
What he does not discuss is the underlying role of the Mandarin language in general for thousands of years in perpetuating a top-down authoritarian power structure. The Confucian system, as practiced in the Middle Kingdom, had multiple grades or levels thru which students could progress, thereby assuring them positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy of the autocratic state.
The standardized testing was largely aimed at the memorization of classic texts of literature, poetry, history or philosophy. As one memorized more, one advanced - or had that potential. In theory this was supposed to guarantee good or at least intelligent rulers, on average. However, out of this structure grew a secondary technology.
The secondary information technology of the Confucian/Mandarin system was the use of phrases and allusions to specific historical or artistic points. A "Mandarin" of a certain level could say one thing explicitly to someone lower down in the hierarchy, knowing that the other Mandarins in earshot, or reading it, who were at a sufficient level of scholarship, would understand that he was saying just the opposite - or something entirely orthogonal - as in (a purely made up example) (explicitly) "You are such a wonderful example of honesty, open like a daisy in the sun," where the term for the flower actually referenced something in a history text about a fool who talked too openly and jeapardized the Emporer, and who therefore, it is suggested should be summarily executed.
Thus, a vertical culture of power, in which each level could communicate securely with its own, but was at the mercy of the level above it, was encouraged.
It is useful to contrast this with the historical structure of the Japanese language, in which it was virtually impossible to address someone as an equal. The various forms of address implied that the other was either a superior or an inferior. Imagine two samuraiis meeting. Anything they say could be taken as grounds for a fight! Thus, the tea ceremonies, etc., and the use of a 3rd party of clearly lower status, who would take the words spoken by one and repeat them to the other. I.e., this required communication between levels of power.
There are many other factors, of course, involved, but the net result of these various cultural factors (such as the primogeniture system of inheritance that tended to concentrate wealth, while the Chinese inheritance system dissipated it, dicussed at some length in Fukuyama's "Trust," which I HIGHLY recommend) led to China becoming one of the all-time low-trust societies of the world, while Japan is close to the top in general interpersonal trust.
Like any big problem, this is potentially a HUGE market opportunity, of course, for whomever finds a solution. As I mentioned somewhere here, my inclination is toward an explicit social contract. If some organization began signing people up to a system of dispute resolution which was properly organized so that everyone could see that it was fair and transparent, something similar in unbiased objectivity to the old common law court system, but streamlined with cost-effective procedures and professional arbitrars, bonding, insurance, and a host of selling features that completely outclassed the expensive, slow, corrupt state court systems, then - simply because the problem is SO bad there, China might actually forge ahead of the entire world.
There's a potential historical parallel in the German military experience, as discussed in Joseph C. Harsch's, "Pattern of Conquest." In WWI, the German military was thoroughly defeated, and, in the process, its many weaknesses were exposed. The consequence - quite independent of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis - was that the Germans systematically reexamined and reengineered literally every aspect of the WehrMacht.
The result of the devastating German defeat, then, was the creation of the world's best fighting force, man for man outclassing anything else by something like ten to one. If it had been a slightly more rational regime running Germany, WWII would have been over in months and there would have been a united Europe, with Germany at the fore. As it happened, of course, the NAZI idiots took everything the WehrMacht handed them and destroyed any value in it, as Harsch describes in detail.
However, the Germans almost took over the world because they listened to criticism. They identified and studied their mistakes. They systematically dismantled the rigid top-down power structure of the old WehrMacht and trained their grunts to think for themselves. They reexamined their whole philosophy of how to conduct war. Instead of the harvest of death of the WWI trenches, the WehrMacht determined to reduce actual violence and destruction to an absolute minimum. Instead of raping the women in a captured village, they called a town meeting and provided milk for the children.
I'm not defending the German invasion of their neighbors. I'm just pointing out that they achieved an incredible level of effectiveness BECAUSE, in that area - their military - they had a total commitment to objectivity, and thus welcomed critique.
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In biology, many fascinating new archeological finds from the age of the Cambrian (540 MYA) when complex animals first became dominant in the oceans, and the age of the dinosaurs, when birds arose, are being made in Chinese fossil beds. Here is an image of the Cretaceous waterfowl 
