Expert shares facts about China

The Americans and Chinese should be competitors, not enemies, the national China expert says.

By ASHLEY TATE

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — “The Chinese are Chinese. They’re not European or American, and we’ve got to recognize that,” said George McCloud, guest speaker Friday at the Kiwanis Club’s weekly meeting.

McCloud, special assistant to the president for university advancement at Youngstown State University and a national China expert, gave a presentation at the Young Men’s Christian Association. He discussed how to manage and figure out the relationship between the United States and China.

As a youngster in the fourth grade, McCloud said he became interested in China when he saw a picture of a young boy, around the same age as him, pedaling a water wheel for irrigation.

“I wondered what it’s like to live in that part of the world that’s so different from mine. China has a lot to learn from us, and we have a lot to learn from China,” McCloud said.

McCloud, who has been visiting China for more than 20 years, describes China as being best understood as an empire, a civilization, not as a country. It’s trying to figure out how to become a country in the modern sense, he said.

McCloud explains the geographic features of China as being the same size as the 48 contiguous states, but having a population of 1.3 billion compared with the U.S. population of 300 million.

It is crucial that the U.S. and China define and manage their relationship because the price of not figuring it out is too high, McCloud said.

This is a price his children and grandchildren will have to pay, which is not acceptable, McCloud said.

“We cannot afford to be enemies. We will risk too much. We are competitors, sharing certain interests and not sharing others. We can learn from the best of each other’s people. Becoming enemies economically or politically is something we need to avoid, frankly,” McCloud said.

If we are enemies, we’ll hurt one another, something McCloud said he doesn’t want to see happen because there are alternatives.

He said we have more than just a relationship with each other’s governments; there’s also a relationship with people. We need to continue to educate young men and women so they become more familiar with one another.

China faces many environmental problems. It is slowly turning into a desert, there is a massive internal migration, coal drives 70 percent of its energy needs, the soil is contaminated and people are dying early because of exposure to contaminants, McCloud said.

China is also a major polluter of the Pacific Ocean, and that in turn, hurts the U.S., he said.