Why don't you just stick to "Turandot," the food and drink, and so on?

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With all that is being taught about the P.R.C. lately in schools, and with the books that have appeared about its style of capitalism as state - sponsored with heavy emphasis placed upon labour productivity and discipline, we as Americans and westerners might take a different approach to P.R.C. and its current role in the world, even as the second most powerful world economy, and without respect to revisionism.  Once one reads about the "Great Leap Forward," "Hundred Flowers," "Cultural Revolution," "Gang of Four," and even stories about the beginning of the last century in places like Bei jing and Shang hai and the role of these and other places, including Nan jing, up through and including the Chinese revolution that ended with the founding of the P.R.C. in 1949; it is impossible to skip over the way this nation treats its own people and the way it presents them to the public here in the West.  We could take a lesson from the former soviets on how to deal with our own commercial and business self - interest and the Chinese in reminding them of some of their bureaucratic shortcomings resulting in lives pilloried and wasted, many of them in building the society in China today as restrictive and productive as it apparently is as compared to the western world.

It might be possible, and this without professing a moral higher ground, with regard to the P.R.C.'s current market power and growing military and public financial interests and insinuations, to appreciate the culture of P.R.C. (not T'ai wan) as having led up to this for a long time, even from before pre - revolutionary days.  One comparison one might make between mainland China of old and today starts with the T'ai pings who can be likened to communist conservatives who showed a kind of Christianism in their belief system, however distorted that vision of Christ was.  The Chinese communists of today with their apparent assimilation of western methods and commercial ideas and practices appear as somewhat palatable followers of western methods, and agnostic at the most (again seemingly) with respect to their attitudes about western people that actually range from extreme xenophobia to ordinary Orientalism.  This is similar to the use of western ideas used by the T'ai pings to try to take over the country during the mid - 1800's, provoking a bloody civil war that threw a good part of the provinces and Bei jing back politically and commercially quite a ways, given the status of Hong Kong, Shang hai and other places, including the capitol after the civil war there had ended.

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It is entirely possible the primacy, however implied by commercial statistics and business methods and rules to date as developed by the Chinese for their own purposes, of the P.R.C. at this point should be called upon to fall back on its laurels of Oriental culture, arts and hospitality, including the overall national emphasis on social interactions and festivities and holidays.  What might prompt this?  When was the last time you valued a product as "Made in China" for anything other than its strictly financial economy?  Without respect to public finances that are needed by its satellites in Asia and the role P.R.C. currently plays in public finance, that country should continue to try defying its role in the world as a rich copy cat, for example, among others, but at the same time need accept that its style of economy pretends to and bears and depends upon being a witness to the detriment of the Occidental powers.  This is in the doctrine of its core ideology and the pronouncements of the country's founders, not so long passed, in Mao T'se toung and Zhou En lai, and others sacrificed on the internal hecatomb of that country starting with its, again internal uprisings at the end of the Qing dynasty.  In exemplary mainland Chinese fashion, the current leadership has made all attempts to get away from this through doubling and redoubling financial and commercial efforts as managed, and as expanding the political and military outreach of the country in a kind of indirect belligerency against all its liberals.  With respect to the legacy of the past, the political role of P.R.C. and its satellites at this point needs be re - examined with respect to the overall legitimacy of its demanding role in world affairs (as the "Crouching Tiger, ... .")