The modern world is Western. Trains, electricity, refrigerators, cars, internet, phones, penicillin, toilets, air-conditioning, and yes pizza and Pepsi.
So said one of the respondents to one of my videos and I must admit, it was.
Yes, China has all those things. It also has several thousand years of traditional medicine and now makes and sells more of the above than all, or most other countries combined.
However, the modern world you speak of seems to me to be locked into the 60s, I was born in 1958 and had all those things, other than internet, when I was a child, we even got colour TV in the 70s and thought that was wonderful. Pizza, according to some stories, was taken back to Italy by Marco Polo, now, I know a few of you will jump on this and tell me that was pasta but this is a less well-known story.
Apparently, Marco Polo was so enamoured with the nang bread that he saw in Xinjiang, an important staple in the Uyghur diet, that he asked his housekeeper to make it in Italy, she served it to him and he added tomato and cheese – I don’t know if it’s true, we can believe that if we want but for sure, pizza is not a symbol of the modern world and if anyone thinks Pizza Hut is – then I feel very sorry for you; as for Pepsi, again, if that’s the best you’ve got in culture to regale me with, you have a very sad life
But, I have to ask; is this what you think of as the modern world? In the 1960s, the USA sent men to the moon, or so they say, I don’t know if they did or they didn’t but I definitely saw a representative of NASA saying they’ve lost the technology to do that, so there’s an element of doubt there that I don’t want to get into, let’s for the moment assume that they did and that was, at the time, the modern world. There’s no doubt the USA led it – but did they, The Soviet Union also sent people, satellites and even had a space walk before the USA did. The modern world was already in existence outside of the USA.
Now, I'd suggest the modern world is led by China. The Chinese created a hybrid rice that prevent the mass starvation of millions of people, they’ve even gone one step further and created a rice that can be grown in salt water – things like this are epoch changing events because it means island nations are able to grow things they’ve never been able to grow before. Deserts in the Middle East really can bloom and less people will die early because of avoidable famines:
In the space race we now have the USA reaching out to China for access to their technologies and China has to make a decision whether to share it or not based on the fact that the US made a law that made such sharing illegal.
China has advanced communications that actually work and are networked throughout the country into every tiny village, cars that drive themselves, ships powered by the sun, automation and robotics that Western countries can only dream of.
The Western system of governance is so advanced that it caters to an elite group of people, even Princeton University has come out and said democracy isn’t working, but China has developed a system of governance that allows people to have a say in how their lives are run and managed
Yes, it’s true, China entered the modern world late and were a little-slower in having refrigerators in every home, having a car, or two parked on every driveway getting air-conditioning into every room of the house or apartment but it certainly didn’t waste any time when it started to catch up – I recently saw a report that the USA would have a high-speed rail soon, then followed by a report that they won’t, it’s gone, scrapped as too expensive. We’ve watched as the President when he was elected 4 years ago promised he would Build Back Better but then he seems to have forgotten since there’s been no new Universities opened in the USA since Florida Polytechnic in 2012 – is the USA’s academia already over-capacity?
The newest Freeway to be built in the USA was the Interstate 11 in Nevada and that opened in 2017, has there been another since then that I’ve missed?
China has opened over 200 new Universities and technical training colleges as well as 177,000 kilometres of new highways since Xi Jinping came to power – should we talk about the 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail or the many fully automated ports that have opened in so many different provinces and regions?
Yes, China was a little slow, it was tough coming from the bottom of the list of poorest countries in the world to the top of the list but, if your definition of the modern world is Trains, electricity, refrigerators, cars, internet, phones, penicillin, toilets, air-conditioning, and yes pizza and Pepsi, China has them all and so much more
Perhaps the reason why Americans think they are the best country in the world, it’s simply because 52% of the population of the Unites States have never applied for a passport and seen what the modern world really looks like now.
But of course, all those videos coming out of China with all those modern cities, high speed trains, EV buses and blue skies are all propaganda aren’t they – or at least they are until, like many people are doing now, coming to China and have a look and seeing for themselves what the modern world looks like – it most certainly isn’t any of the big cities in the United States with dirty, rat infested and crime ridden urban jungles
But perhaps the view I have of America is also wrong, perhaps those graffiti’d walls and closed down high streets, with boarded up factories don’t exist outside of the thousands of videos I’m seeing.
Perhaps those tent cities where people are forced to live or those parking lots with cars that don’t drive being used as temporary accommodation, or the zombie like people living in the street aren’t really America and the USA really is a modern, wonderful place, just like Hollywood portray it to be.
I guess I’ll never know because, although I’ve had a passport since I was about 15 years old, I don’t think I’ll ever get to the United States to see for myself and if I were to try, I’m fairly sure they won’t let me in – especially after seeing some of my videos!
But to get back to the point of the video – the modern world is not now what it was 60 years ago, it’s moved on and it’s moved on in Asia. The West has War, something China hasn’t seen in your lifetime, unless you’re over 40 years old and, in particular, the USA seems to be trapped in its 1960s-time warp. It most certainly was the world’s most advanced place, it was amazing and its citizens need to be kept in a constant state of remaining misinformed because if they only knew what China was like they would, the must demand better – I know I would!
Pizza. In 1950s our family's occasional luxury treat was cheese on toast, with a tomato on top (aka Welsh Rarebit mod.). Archaeologists in Arizona (?) USA recently unearthed utensils identified as "made in China" over 1000 years since shows Han/Hakka were modernists, traded in peace, and not as genocidal colonialists unlike Europeans.