David Brooks today profiles Edward Tian, a Chinese Internet mogul who rose from being a child casualty of the Cultural Revolution, to being one of the most powerful men in China. It's an amazing tale, really. Tian's parents were dispossessed by the Maoist berserkers, but he was just at the right age to take advantage of Deng's opening to the West. He went to college at Texas Tech, studied agriculture, but really learned about computers in his spare time, because he was lonely. Tian returned to China just in time to take advantage of the Internet's introduction there. And then?
...Tian seized the historical moment. He and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AsiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year.In 1999, the Chinese government created a new company, China Netcom Group, to compete with China Telecom in bringing broadband to China. Tian was asked to become chief executive, and he accepted. The ranch researcher from Lubbock ended up with 230,000 people working for him.
I found this passage to be the most striking of the entire column, not only for what it tells us about the Chinese character today, but also for what it says about our own:
Recently, he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Malaysia and arrived late and hungry to a buffet dinner. He went to the buffet table, piled his plate with rice and began furiously shoveling it into his mouth. A friend said he was embarrassing his fellow Chinese by behaving like a peasant. “I had to think about why I was behaving like that.”
I had to think about why I was behaving about that. Jayziz, can you imagine your average American today thinking that in a similar situation? Two generations ago, yes. But today? Here you have a tremendously rich and powerful Chinese executive, but he still has the humility to want to improve himself (as distinct from merely enriching himself).
This makes me think about our therapized American culture. This also makes me think about what a Dallas public high school teacher told me not long ago. He said that the widespread acceptance of the values of hip-hop culture -- rebellion against authority, self-satisfaction, the obsession with self-gratification, the groundless demand for "respect" disconnected from one's own behavior -- is crippling his students' future by rotting their character.
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So a right and proper capitalist sells out to the Chinese Reds in return for them keeping tabs on who's using the internet and acts like a tourist at a half price buffet. Shows the potential to be the next Secretary of the Treasury in a Republican admin. He's sold out, looking to satisfy his own interests,demands respect from the 230000 peasants beneath him and is a true playa. When's his new CD droppin, dawg-san
Dude, he was shovelling food into his mouth because he was hungry.
Have you ever seen Jonah Goldberg at the Hometown Buffet? Not a pretty sight.
John E.:
Showing a command of the obvious, I figured that part out ...
My two-part question to Rod was:
1. Why the attacks on therapy? and
2. Why on earth the bizarre comparison with gangsta rap?
Indeed, Larry. It would be interesting to hear Rod's take on those things. I found scarshapedstar's comments interesting and mostly accurate. My only disagreement is that I, for one, am WAY happier than I was as a child. That's because now, as an adult, I get to make my own decisions, and I'm no longer at the mercy of other people's undiagnosed and untreated problems. Yay therapy, I say. Things, and people, can change. Progress can be made. Life can get better.
sig and scarshapedstar:
You both remind me of the conservative nostalgia for the '50s, where every family lived in a new Levittown-type home in the suburbs, had 2.5 kids, the dad went to work in the city in a gray flannel suit and the mom stayed at home and baked cookies (in Hillary Clinton's words) and (given the season) every Christmas was one straight out of Currier and Ives.
Except it was also the decade of Brown v. Board of Ed. and Rosa Parks and Little Rock. Which is to say, the decade when African-Americans finally began to forcefully confront the American power structure that had held them down for 350 years. (And good for them.)
Funny how all the nostalgics forget about that part of the Ike Era.
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