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7 Nisan 5765 - April 4, 2006 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Observations


Observations: China May Soon Surpass the USA
by Mordecai Plaut

The United States has been a world power for almost a century, was one of two superpowers for over 40 years after World War II, and for the past 15 years or so has been alone in its class. However this looks likely to change before long, as China is growing by leaps and bounds and is beginning to flex its muscles.

This is most visible in China's immediate neighborhood, Southeast Asia and the Pacific countries, where students are beginning to study Chinese instead of English. Beijing is actively promoting its language and its culture.

As America seals itself off from the world, in fear of terror, the Chinese are rushing in to fill the gap. America is also having to retrench economically, even as China is expanding. It is clear that America is still the military power, but the direction of the momentum favors China.

For example, China Radio International now broadcasts in English 24 hours a day, while the Voice of America broadcasts 19 hours and will soon be cut back to 14 hours. The Chinese also have a state television channel, CCTV-9, that broadcasts in English worldwide. CNN International, which is private, cannot compare to it.

American cultural centers run by the State Department's United States Information Service, which once were all over and offered English-language training and library services, were closed as part of worldwide cutbacks in the 1990s. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, used to have three United States information centers. They were shut down and a new program that provides books, computers and databases for a handful of Indonesian university libraries has much less impact.

China is consciously trying to provide concrete alternatives to the US. The Chinese president and Communist Party chief, Hu Jintao, told the Australian Parliament last year, "The Chinese culture belongs not only to the Chinese but also to the whole world. We stand ready to step up cultural exchanges with the rest of the world in a joint promotion of cultural prosperity."

Growing numbers of Asian students are taking advantage of opportunities for higher education in China. If they cannot get into elite American universities, Chinese universities are seen as good enough, even if they are not as good as the top American schools.

In Indonesia, for example, the first generation of government technocrats was called the "Berkeley mafia" because so many were graduates of the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

Last year, 2,563 Indonesian students received visas to go to China for study, according to the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta, a 51 percent increase over the previous year. Only 1,333 Indonesian students received visas for study in the United States in 2003, the United States consul general in Jakarta said. In contrast, it issued 6,250 student visas in 2000.

"You are losing ground; that's a fact of life," said Prof. Tanun Anumanrajadhon, the vice president of international affairs at Chiang Mai University, told Jane Perlez of the New York Times. "People here are talking of China and economics. People don't care about democracy now."

At Mae Fah Luang University in Thailand, the Sirindhorn Chinese Culture Center opened early this year. When the university asked the American ambassador to Thailand if he was interested in arranging something similar, he just laughed. The ambassador had no hope of any money from Washington.

The Singapore government still sends a handful of students on scholarships to the top universities in the United States and Britain, but it has also introduced a parallel program to send equal numbers of its best students to China and India.

It works the other way as well. At Assumption University in Bangkok, Chinese enrollment was only 50 students five years ago. This year, 800 Chinese students are studying there.

In the last several years, Chinese tourists have started to catch up to Japanese tourists in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, a favorite country for tourists of all kinds, more than 800,000 Chinese travelers visited in 2002, compared with just over a million Japanese, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association. Last year, Chinese tourists to Thailand outnumbered American.

Even longtime friends of the United States say China's influence appears to be growing at America's expense.

A Singapore official who studied in both the US and in China said, "The world revolved around the United States for a very long time. I think people are beginning to understand that one day China can become another superpower."

 

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