Sometimes one has the impression that globalization is nothing more than globalized nationalisms. Among them stands China’s nationalism. What China did was nothing else than make an exact copy of the Western obsession with boundless, endless
increase in production and consumption of commodities and sell it to the West at a lower price. Joe Bennett documents the gigantic development of China with his unique narrative talent, in a book in which he seeks the source of his… underpants. His original query: how is it possible to buy so many cheap ‘made in China’ products and be in almost complete ignorance about China and the modus operandi of its economy? Joe travelled to this huge mother of world trade to discover how, where and by whom his underpants are manufactured. What were his impressions? They were mixed. On the one hand, happy (too happy perhaps for Westerners), smiling people. But, on the other, a huge scale in almost everything, a shocking exploitation and mechanization of workers, a dirty and uncontrolled ‘develpoment’. Such a large scale, that human beings get lost on the way, become dots on monitors, like in the port of Shanghai:
excerpt in English (the control tower in the port of Shanghai) not available
China learned to play the insane game of global capitalism, of production of mass commodities out of every proportion, of total control of human beings, better than Westerners. And without biting its own bait, without becoming a consumer itself. But, one may wonder, does not China import anything? Of course it does:
excerpt in English (China's imports and exports) not available
Reading Bennett’s book one realizes that, in the dusk of the hubristic Western consumerist civilization, we see the dawn of its nemesis: its exact copy, selling to it its own products cheaper, faster, and easier. Today’s globalized capitalism could not find itself in a worse adventure than that of depending, for its own survival, on a far more cynical, inhumane, mechanical version of it, tirelessly set to prove that all these cheap copies it massively produces may, eventually, embody globalized capitalism's more authentic spirit.
