One beautiful Friday morning not too long ago as I was starting my gas guzzling Town & Country van and turning on my radio, I heard the announcer on my preset music station say something that I had never heard before on that local station: “One billion listeners cannot be wrong!” These words in English were then followed by Chinese music, one Chinese melody after another, with the requisite plaintive violins, dramatic drums and other instruments that I am not familiar with.
What happened? I thought to myself. Did American economy finally collapse and the Chinese government stepped in to take over the country to make sure that the debts owed to the Chinese state will be repaid?
It takes me exactly 13 minutes to drive from my house to the bookstore where I was going that morning. As the radio station kept playing Chinese music, I was playing in my head the scenario of the Chinese takeover of my adopted country.
There would need to be only minimal changes in the political structure. The Chinese communist party would probably choose to keep the present political structure in place. Republicans would continue to make their traditional, pre-election noise to pander to the far right, and Democrats would continue to make their own version of their traditional, pre-election noise, pretending that they really care about the rest of the country, which of course they don’t. Many people still don’t seem to realize it, but the noise that Rs and Ds make, usually before an election, is completely meaningless.
After the elections, the Rs and Ds would be told how to vote on each and every issue in return for the money for the next election, just like before the takeover. The only change would be that instead of being controlled through the money from Wall Street, the Ds and Rs would be controlled through money from China. China has plenty of money because it has hundreds of millions of serfs who have to work for next to nothing. My country is not quite there yet, but the way things are going, my children probably will be. Since the Chinese state has more money than Wall Street, it could decide either to get rid of it, or incorporate it in a slightly modified political structure in some manner, perhaps as a buffer between the Chinese communist party and the Congress. But I am guessing that China would probably decide to get rid of Wall Street and lobbyists and pay Rs and Ds directly. It makes sense because it would save a lot of money.
China is really not a communist country anymore – there is more socialism on Wall Street than there is in what used to be called “Red China” these days. The bank bailouts are a typical example of how economy used to work in a communist economic system: When a big bank was about to collapse in a communist country due to fraud, criminality and gross mismanagement, the bank would be bailed out by tax payers because it was too big fail, which was exactly what happened here.
In contrast to that, banks would be allowed now to fail in modern China because they are not bigger than the party that is running the country. This is just one example of the fact that China is in many respects much more capitalistic these days than the United States.
So, hardly any changes would be required in the political structure, although there would be probably some changes in the economic structure, for example freeloading banks would be allowed to collapse when their casino games no longer bring in profits because everybody’s money has been more or less stolen already.
The one problem that China will have, when it starts taking over other countries to control them through Chinese capital, is the language problem.
This is a big problem for China. I tried to learn the Chinese language at one point, something like 35 years ago. I thought that it would be relatively easy for me because I was already studying Japanese and I really liked Japanese characters, which are based on Chinese characters. But when I realized that I would have to learn 4 pitched tones and a “toneless tone” which give the characters in the Chinese language their meaning, I chickened out after a few months and decided to concentrate on Japanese which has no tones.
How do you make Americans, who are so proudly monolingual and monocultural, learn Chinese and listen to Chinese music? It’s an impossibility. You might as well expect a high-level functionary in the Chinese communist party to learn fluent English.
When I left the bookstore after about 20 minutes, the sinister Chinese music was still being played on my favorite station, which is heard loud and clear throughout Easter Virginia and the northern part of North Carolina.
It was probably just a dry run. The Chinese government probably gave some money to the station to play traditional Chinese music to gauge the reaction of American public to Chinese music to see how best to prepare plans for the impending takeover of the country. On my way home I started searching for music through other stations on my preset buttons, but it was the usual menu consisting of Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Eminem, and Adele (God, I hate her, especially that one song in which she is completely out of tune, I think it’s called “Someone Like You”).
When I turned on the radio next day, I was relieved to hear that my station was back to the usual mix of latest American pop and rock hits. My guess is that there were too many irate callers demanding that “American” music be played again on their station, especially callers from North Carolina, and the station management complied once the check from China was safely deposited.
The Chinese must be still trying to figure out what to do about the language problem.
