Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.
“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.
The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world - surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills - can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.
Here’s the latest entry in “the U.S. is doomed” sweepstakes.
Actually, what will most likely happen is that the best of these new Chinese creators will emigrate to the U.S. to escape the various restraints and horrors of their homeland. They will always think of themselves as Chinese, but they’ll be living somewhere else.
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Actually, it does have several precedents. Most of them, including the last one to America from Europe, haven’t been acknowledged or, in most cases, even properly documented.
While the best of the Chinese may not make it all the way to the US, they likely won’t stay on the mainland.