1) Modern China has become the biggest market in the world for luxury goods.
2) Modern China has become the largest auto market in the world.
3) Modern China has become the second-largest economy in the world (soon to be first).
4) Modern China has been leading the world in cat-scan technology.
5) Modern China has been leading the world in DNA mapping and synthesizing.
6) Modern China has brought 400 million people out of poverty in only 30 years.
7) Modern China has built the most undersea tunnels.
8) Modern China has built the world’s largest dam.
9) Modern China has built the world’s longest bridges.
10) Modern China has built two series of commercial aircraft that now compete with Boeing.
11) Modern China has created the largest (and best-funded) banks in the world.
12) Modern China has created the world’s fastest train.
13) Modern China has created what is already the world’s largest middle class.
14) Modern China has Designed and built a series of 4-passenger flying boats.
15) Modern China has designed and built the world’s fastest computer – 1.5 times faster than the Jaguar in the US – due to a Chinese-designed O/S.
16) Modern China has designed and built the world’s second-deepest submersible.
17) Modern China has designed and built two fully electric aircraft now on sale in the US.
18) Modern China has designed and its own space station.
19) Modern China has developed the deepest ultra-oil drilling.
20) Modern China has developed embryonic stem cells using human skin cells.
21) Modern China has discovered of Earth-like extra-solar planets.
22) Modern China has drawn graphics of dark matter in the universe.
23) Modern China has done successful tracing of the photon.
24) Modern China has discovered genes that cause various diseases.
25) Modern China has accomplished the first “genome transplant” in living organisms.
26) Modern China has created a DNA brake.
27) Modern China has achieved a record in quantum communications distance.
28) Modern China has had an increase in GNP of 10% p.a. for 30 years.
29) Modern China has created its own GPS Satellite System.
30) Modern China has put a probe on the moon.
31) Modern China has put men into space.
32) Modern China has surpassed Japan for the number of patents issued annually.
33) Modern China has the highest number of English-speaking people in the world.
34) Modern China has the largest HSR track network.
35) Modern China leads the world in electric car and battery technology.
Document at:
My Articles About China and/or Chinese Culture
16 Basic Desires: China versus US
35 Accomplishments of Modern China
Acronym for Eight Types of Chinese Regional Cuisine
American versus Chinese Culture
American versus Chinese Culture
Chinese Astrological Analysis of Nations
Chinese Astrology 60 Year Cycle
Chinese Dream and American Reality
Extending China’s One Belt One Road Initiative to Latin America
Table of Chinese Astrology 19th – 21st Century
The 36 Stratagems as Portrayed in Comic Books
Virtual Chinese Reunification Palace
You can also download my autobiography of my struggle with a bipolar condition on Am I Kitsune on my Google Drive.
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Dr. Hugh Fox III 
Some of these are good to point out, but most seem to be the typical gigantism of late capitalist economies. That China is trying to lead in unsustainable paths of development is hardly impressive, it is exactly what we would expect from a state and capitalist class driven to insanity by “modernization.”
China is copying “developed” nations but ironically the developed nations are developed if you think self destructive consumerism is a good idea. The current path of national development of just about every country on the planet except maybe Bhutan, which has other problems, probably means no human race in fifty years!
So why are you pimping the rise of China?
Mostly I noticed a gap in this sort of scholarship and when possible try to fill such gaps. Also, I think these accomplishments are of historical importance and give people an overview of how China compares with other nations in modern times as opposed to the usual list which mixes accomplishments of ancient and modern China. Its a list and useful reference material not a discussion of the whole direction of modern society.
By the way your blog is fantastic! Keep up the good work! I enjoy reading the articles! I also totally disagree with the fundamental premise of your blog. You state in your blog introduction that “I believe that the major tension in American culture is the libertarian, anarchist, and cooperative.”. Great idea but I think you are absolutely wrong. The US may be “liberal” within its own borders but the Pax Americana has clearly followed the pattern of past empires but with softer edges. I also don’t see much anarchy in the American mind. I think mindless consumerism is the best description of the current state of American culture. I think your overall view is hopelessly “idealistic” in the sense that you think ideas move economic reality while I think economic conditions shape ideas. You cannot have an incredibly developed and sophisticated consumer system which in turn is part of an intricate imperialistic machine and then expect the citizens within that machine to have any major impulse besides going to the mall and shopping. I think you should look up the difference between prescriptive and descriptive. Your blog introduction is prescriptive i.e. is making a statement about how US society should be rather than describing the actual reality of US society. However, prescriptive is needed but should be labeled as such! Your articles on Frank Norris are the best and I would label them literary criticism with a strong ideological slant. Do me a favor and apply some of the intelligence you show in your blog when writing comments on my blog. I am “pimping”? Really? Is that the best you can come up with? I think you can come up with a more eloquent turn of phrase than that!
I do not think I deny that the US is an empire. (I have an entire category on that theme and it has been there since the beginning.) My argument is that the American written tradition had a strong anarchist tension.
I do not deny some of what you pointed out. In some ways my blog is a eulogy for America, although I rarely am that pessimistic openly.
I am certainly not arguing that the US literary tradition is “liberal” (although there are some that fit into both the mode of classical and post-New Deal liberalism). The blog title comes from Voltarine de Cleyre who promoted “anarchism without adjectives.” I think that is a way to organize the American tradition, broadly speaking. You may not see it, but over 270 posts I have tried to show it is there is a variety of motifs ranging from strong individualism to outright anti-capitalism. If you do not see an anarchist tension in Hawthorne, we can agree to disagree, but if you do not see it in Paine, Melville, Twain, and Thoreau you are not trying. (But see my posts on Lovecraft for some of the limits of this.)
On your post, allow me to rephrase. If you really think the type of modernization that China is engaged in is going to lead to the destruction of humanity, why praise China’s fetish for gigantism and sustain the cliche that China is the future? I notice that your 35 points say little about values, liberty, democracy, and solidarity. I have noticed that many of the people praising China’s economic success have little interest in asking these questions. China can have the biggest skyscraper, the fastest train, and the deepest oil wells, I just hope the future belongs to those with the deepest camaraderie, greatest freedom, and an unsurpassed commitment to equality. Does China have any of these yet? If not, I will pin my hopes on the future elsewhere.
270 posts! Very impressive! Again its just a list. I have a fetish for lists not China! Accomplishments are things done not values. If the title was a list of Chinese values then it would be appropriate to list Chinese values. I think I must have well over a hundred lists on my blog and maybe just maybe five articles out of 1,500 something about China. China has tons and tons of problems. I actually lived in China between 1999-2,000 and have no desire to live there again. The biggest problem I had with the place was overcrowding and the pollution. I also found the “hive”, yes this is a Borg reference, a little much to put up with on a daily basis. I have to give the Chinese family system credit on the value side! Americans talk about family values! The Chinese do family values. Camaraderie is alive and well in China at the family level in a way its not present in the US! I consider commentary to be part of a blog entry so anyone who reads the list is also getting this critical commentary, problem solved! Thanks for the well written thought out response. I appreciate the effort! Have you been to China? If not then I think you should go pen in hand and write up China on your blog when you get back. I would look forward to reading your insights. China is very, very complicated. Great “accomplishments” side by side with great stupidities. Not an easy place to figure out at all. My simplistic take on China is “I love the Chinese but I do not necessarily love China”. Again articles about comic books outnumber articles about China maybe 20 to one so that tells you what my main interests are. I started this blog with a pop culture emphasis but slowly it has become a teaching tool and then sort of a reflection of whatever interests me that particular day or week. Its all over the place unlike your blog.
I lived in Guangzhou a decade ago for about a year, probably around the time you were there. My masters is in Chinese history and global comparative history. My Ph.D. is in international labor history. I am not an expert of contemporary China though, but know enough to finds its rise undesirable (largely because I oppose a deepening of global capitalist institutions).
China will remain outside of my blog for now. Although I live in Taiwan, my academic interest now is in American science fiction, literature, radicalism, and alternative models of world histories. China, it seems to me, is fighting to be part of an old world that is dissolving under our feet. When I see evidence that China and the Chinese want to fight for the future of humanity, they may yet again get my attention. (But Taiwanese have been impressive as of late.)
Cannot say I agree with your perception of the United States. Whenever I am back in Wisconsin I instantly feel greater community than I ever did. If families are strained it is because they are under the assault of capital. In any case, I find family-centered camaraderie deeply anti-social and dangerous (and authoritarian even in the absence of the dictatorship of the Confucian family). But go to a Wisconsin bar and then step into one in China or Taiwan and can instantly feel that the United States still have the remnants of a community (perhaps that is a perverted Midwestern perspective, where some of us still do not “bowl alone”).
I absolutely know what you mean about a bar in the Midwest. I lived in East Lansing, Michigan from the age of 13 to 22? and really miss those sort of Midwestern bars. I have been up and down Asia and have found nothing even close. Korea was the worst, giant bar districts but no sense of connection between me and the pubs. A giant part of it was my own foreign identity. Still it was like eating food made out of wax. Koreans get the look of American bars but the spirit is just not there and in a way the fact that the bars are such good copies externally just made my alienation towards the bar scene worse not better. At least Chinese and Taiwanese bars are imperfect copies so your expectations are kept low. Yeah the whole Confucian system comes with lots of cons. The biggest one I see is the whole treating humans as means via the five relationships and almost making sure authentic relationships in the existential sense are impossible. I have lived in six countries in Asia for the last 15 years and China is not the worst in this sense of relationships not being ends in of themselves but means to an end i.e. inauthentic. Thailand is far worse than NE Asia in this sense. The ability to treat all human relationships as means rather than ends has been developed to a fine art in Thailand compared to the rest of the world. I live here so I won’t go into detail. I am used to it and you can adjust but many Westerners with any sense of camaraderie towards the locals soon find this is a weakness to be exploited. There are of course always exceptions but romantics and idealists would perhaps be best advised not to live and work in Thailand. Believe it or not Guangzhou is actually more “human” in many ways than the East coast of China which is were I resided and very much the heart of the Chinese empire and thus takes efficient depersonalization to new heights. China is not trying to make a new model of human relationships! The failed cultural revolution makes China suspicious of any such ideology and the focus is on economic development. The only good thing you can say about China in this area is that at least the discussion of the Chinese Dream at least shows some awareness of the problem. You can have discussions with NE Asians about all the issues mentioned. If I talked about the Thai Dream compared to the American Dream then my Thai girlfriend would smile and ask what I want to eat that evening. The solution to existential angst in the land of smiles is to make merit at the temple, a series of physical actions, strangely at odds with the American stereotype of meditative Buddhists but who is to say this is not a good solution since its does seem to lead to happiness for the Thais!