China has great advantages. One is the U.S. is not standing in its way. And that's probably the most important. But is that good?

Second-handed stories about China.

Some one I knew visit China a couple years ago on an artistic excursion to see how vases are made.

Thousands of people are involved as he elaborated on the process. Some dig out the clay, others create the vases, others create the designs and so forth and finally, someone else fires the vases in the final step in the chain of production.

But where's the artistry?

Art is, I thought, an individual expression, not a group effort. Group expressions or expressions of a group are just propaganda. Right?

Let's put aside Chinese vases for the moment, and consider an anecdote about a night visit to a McDonald's in China, which city I don't recall.

Image people, Chinese people, most having a paper cup for a soft drink with them as they slept at tables. You have to have purchases something to stay at a table, but they are sleeping. Why? Well, no one asked them, and they didn't state their motivation either. They sleep at their chosen table at two o'clock in the morning.

Visitors to China enter with their caretaker, an escort. In the old Soviet Union the job of the caretaker was to make the country look good by avoiding issue which were ultimately political, because in a closed society driven by a totalitarian ideology everything is political, even the guy employed to give out the toilet paper at the public rest room, because everyone has a ‘right to work.'

So, the official escort leads the way into the golden arches franchise, and everyone orders, and sits and eats. All is quiet. Everyone concentrates on Big Macs and fries.

A young Chinese woman, somewhere in her early twenties, dressed in the signature McDonald's uniform with cap, commences the tasks of sweeping the floor. Inadvertently, she bumps into an older woman, rousing her from slumber, and the Kung Pow pork hits the fan.

In Western Societies, the demand for decades was to respect your elders, and as we all know that has changed. Violent crime against the elder in some urban areas has bordered on blood sports. The People's Republic of China, though a totalitarian or authoritarian construction depending on who you talk to demand that all are equal. Well, in China, the elder still demand respect for their age, a very noble idea, which the West should reconsider, but as I stated earlier: the Kung Pow pork hits the fan.

The elder Chinese patron, having been sleeping at the restaurant table foe who knows how long, is jostled from her slumber. She then stands and begins to scream at the young woman who was just doing her job, while also disturbing everyone else. Along with the screaming, the elderly Chinese woman blows her nose into a series of paper napkins, and after loading each one ups, lobs them at the young McDonald's employee.

This goes on for at least thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is a long time at two in the morning when you're a visitor to a foreign country and you're just trying to eat in peace.

One of the visitors escorted in by a Chinese handler, losses it. It is, of course, an American. The request is made loud, clear, and succinct, "Shut the hell up, I'm trying to eat.”

The snotty, verbal assault on the McDonald's employee ceases. The elderly woman is stunned. She does not utter a word to the American, but attracts the attention of a passing Westerner, a young man with a backpack and unkempt hair on his own tour of the People's Republic.

Offended old woman wants him to reproach the American.

He looks to the American, considers, and then says, "I don't know him,” and then goes on.

This scene may not seem like much when it has been reported that McDonald's restaurants in America have been turned into veritable arenas for brawls. But this incident says something about China, something that does not appear in the news, or in books.

Every country has a cultural history and not all of it can be wiped away with any revolution. China has cultural. Tattoos are not popular in China though many of the young do like them. The dislike is so much so, that only now, has the Chinese military wavered those with tattoos for military service.

In China, an intelligent young man in the military is considered a waste, nothing noble or honorable about service to the nation apparently. That's strange, considering in an authoritarian state, the state is the state, the end all, where the loyalty must be.

What will the parents of all these young men do when war comes? Tattoos or no tattoos, intelligence or no intelligence, loyalty to the state or not loyalty to the state, they're no protection against bullets and bombs. The Chinese people have never been involved in a major modern war. I'd like to know what the average citizen of the People's Republic of China thinks.

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