Watching China win the largest number of gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, outdistancing the heretofore dominant United States, gave me a pleasure, as a fellow Asian, that I haven't had in decades. In modern history, China underwent all sorts of humiliations and miseries. Now, under able leadership, China is regaining its true self.
The achievement in the sports arena is just a forerunner of what lies ahead. Various Western analysts predict China will overtake America in GDP two decades from now. The ultimate battle for supremacy, however, will be in science and technology. It is naive to think that Americans will continue to take the lion's share of Nobel Prizes forever. Before World War II, far fewer Americans were winning the prestigious award than Germans or Britons. The Chinese are a great people. They taught us Japanese kanji, religion (Buddhism) and ways of thought (Confucianism), and provided other fruits of culture and civilization over millennia. Now unfettered by basic impediments to development, they seem on their way toward what they used to be -- the Middle Kingdom -- both in name and substance.
When my 6-year-old grandson becomes my age (77), Chinese will be receiving more Nobel Prizes than Americans and Japan's brightest youths will be aspiring to attend Qinghua and Beijing universities rather than Harvard and MIT.
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