China Grows Mutant-Like While the USA Founders 

It’s been about 40 years since I wrote Information Beijing: How to Do Business in China. I wrote it as an employee of Welt Publishing, which specialized in books and newsletters about doing business overseas. I wrote it like the uninformed writer I was at the time, from secondary research and a few conversations with colleagues. I hadn’t even traveled to Beijing. And yet it got good reviews.

Since then, I’ve been to China, for business and pleasure, about a half-dozen times. And I’ve seen firsthand how things have changed. Back in the 1990s, business opportunities were opening up for foreigners but with considerable restrictions. By the early 2000s, things had loosened up and all sorts of sectors were growing. And in the last 10 to 15 years, the Chinese government began to invest hugely in infrastructure, building roads and dams and cities like nothing I’d ever seen or even read about.

Instead of spending billions each year on policing the world, the Chinese government had a different idea: They would do everything possible to become the world’s leading economy –  leveraging their huge population and the combination of central control and semi-free markets and investing commercially in developing countries to open up new markets. And then, about 10 years ago, they began to buy lots and lots of gold as US reserves were depleting.

In short, it looked like China was outpacing the US in every economic and commercial category of growth. But in recent visits, I noticed two things that disturbed me: the enormous smog that hung over many of its most populated cities, and the unfathomable lack of people in some of the new cities.

Tom Dyson has been noticing the same things as he and his family travel through China. If you are interested in this massively important global trend, you might want to check out his blog post– “Prepare for ‘Stagflation’ by Owning Gold and Silver” – and perhaps subscribe to his service.