David Klepper provides an insighful report about China's record-breaking economic progress in yesterday's Kansas City Star:

In his informative article, Mr. Klepper quotes Zheng Jian Jun, plant manager of a wind turbine farm in Mongolia. "I am bringing a clean world with a blue sky, white clouds and beautiful generators," says Mr. Zheng.

I admire Mr. Zheng's optimism, and I hope his statement proves correct.

Klepper's McLatchey report also mentions that "not far away lies China's largest open coal pit, a gaping maw the size of a thousand football fields. It dwarfs the huge trucks carrying coal to the adjacent power plant."

This  juxtoposition of Mongolian wind-farming with what may be the world's largest open-pit  coal mine is an indicator of the choices that await the Chinese people-- and really, when you get down to it-- all of us in the rest of the world as well. Will our carbon footprints become larger or smaller?

When the USA was in its industrializing stage, a hundred or so years ago, the use of fossil fuels enabled and dominated our development. We didn't understand until much later what precious environmental costs would be demanded of us. China has, so far, in many ways followed our highfalutin wild-west example. So many of their cities look like smoggy L.A. on a bad day. I have seen this.

Klepper also casts some light on how Chinese governmental centralization has facilitated some impressive momentum in that republic's haste to develop. " Many China experts," he writes, "...expatriates and business leaders say, with some irony, that the central government played the key role in this capitalist revolution."

And yes, that is ironic. I see shades of the Hegel/Marxian dialectic in this scenario. Just think about it.

A few centuries ago, movers and shakers in Europe emerged from the Renaissance with some new ideas about how the world was supposed to work. Adam Smith, among many others, presented some ideas about money that have revolutionized the world and set prosperity-seeking pioneers on a path of uninhibited free enterprise. As capitalism emerged from the shadows of medieval society,  abuses,  predictably enough (since this involved the human race), were systemized along the way.  As many people increased their wealth and made new wealth, men exploited other men. While many women benefited from the economic free-for-all, many were oppressed;  thousands, millions of workers were enlisted into the great tide of rising prosperity, though many were stretched to intolerable limits. Some people-groups were enslaved.  The rich became richer while the poor got a little bit better and in some cases relatively poorer, and those folks in the middle became more numerous.

Karl Marx analyzed all this and, with a little help from his Leninist followers, came up with a new plan. Long about 1917, Bolsheviks in Russia decided to use some of his ideas of redistributing all that capitalist wealth as a basis for their new governments.  Communism was born, like everything and everybody else in the world, in a series blood-letting events that produced a lot of pain and some gain.

As the 20th century rolled by, the Marxist prototype, later absconded by Stalin and other disregarders of human dignity, forced its way into the world of commerce and nationbuilding. The Russian model became a real force to contend with.

Communism became the antithesis to Capitalism's thesis. Marx was right about that part.

Along came Mao Zedong. He took Marx's ideas quite seriously; but along his trailblazing struggle toward a Chinese version of communism, he introduced a few changes of his own. Those Maoist principles had their working out in the Chinese revolution in 1949, and the subsequent years, including the great leap forward in the late 50's, which was a time of severe, centralized rearrangement of industrial and agrarian resources and labor. Then came the so-called cultural revolution in the 60's, which was, as near as I can figure, a period in which Mao decided that the old revolutionaries who had forged the new order were starting to screw things up.  So the chairman and his inner circle recruited the next generation of whippersnappers out into the highways and byways of Chinese infrastructure to set the old farts straight.

From my perspective as an American, the cultural revolution was a big mess and it made a lot of Chinese citizens mad and many of them dead. But hey, shit happens. Not long after that, Mao passed into the great proletarian struggle in the sky.

Enter Deng Xiaopeng. Here's where we get back to the Hegelian/Marxian dialectic. Long story short:  Deng and his crew introduced to the world what would become the Synthesis  of western capitalism and Russian communism.

And my take on this is: Mao had not realized it at the time, but with his communist blunderbuss tinkering, he was setting Chinese prosperity-seeking economic development back--basically kicking the whole country into neutral--for several decades.

What we have emerging now in China is a gargantuan dragon of pent-up consumer demand, a lot of energy, and a bunch of industrious people who will define the paradigm for world development for the next hundred years or so.

We in America will become to them what Europe was to us. And the Europeans will become the grand old sages of capitalistic socialism. And we'll all live happily ever after. Let's hope so anyway.

When the aftermath of all these changes settles, I'm hoping we'll still have an appropriate reserve of American ingenuity and innovation to find new avenues toward progress and prosperity.

We'll need to think out of the box, like some of our forebears--Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, Rachel Carson, Bucky Fuller, Bill Gates, people like that.

And we do, you know, need, in the midst of these tsunamic changes, a new growth industry or two.  The old ones--petrol cars and coal-generated megawatts--are not sustainable for much longer. Let's help the Chinese and others hop on the sustainability bandwagon, even as we ourselves leap forward onto it.

Got any ideas you want to implement? You might be the Edison of Solar.