buying a large volume of scrap copper and brass

--Rumor is they're hard at work building a new blue-water navy. Sure to be useful once we wise up and yank away their "most favored nation" status in a few years. You guys up for feeding their power lust?

According to my mother and aunts, one of my Grandfather's main topics at the dinner table prior to WW2 was how all the scrap iron being sold to Japan would be sent back to us in the form of bombs. Dec.7, 1941 proved him right.

Taiwan has had a taste of freedom and I can't see them ever submitting willingly to a tyrannical government on the mainland. IMO if the PRC tries to assimilate the Taiwanese they will be infected with the idea of freedom and that will be the downfall of the old Communist system. Dennis

Your understanding of mainland China seems to be at least a couple of decades out of date. The mainlanders are already infected with capitalism (and the necessary freedoms which go along with that). They're also rapidly developing consumerism, with what that implies in terms of politics as well.

The central government remains much more authoritarian than the US, but then so is the government on Taiwan, or in Singapore, or even Japan. The US represents one extreme of the political spectrum, places like North Korea the other. Most modern industrial nations fall somewhere in between the two extremes. China has definitely become a modern industrial nation over the last two decades.

Gary

Here in Australia our Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was forever known as "Pig-Iron Bob" for exactly that reason.

-- Jeff

I was in china last week, (PRC), actually. It was my first trip to asia. I expected third world, like the text books had groomed me to believe. What I found was a place alot like any big city in the US, only with more chineese speaking people =). It was very suprising to me, also, even more suprising, was that nearly everyone I ran into spoke english pretty well (at least well enough to communicate). Japan was exactly opposite, it was much more difficult to find english speaking people, and those that did, were more difficult to communicate with.