"Chair Wars"??!?!?

In a fit of procrastination, I was poking about on the TIME magazine website. Apparently, the BIG news for this issue is "ITALY vs CHINA." Who knew?

One of the main pieces is an article on the ferocious chair-making battle being fought by those two dread and fearsome nations. The sub-heading reads like a publicity piece for a boxing tournament: "What happens when old-world craftsmanship collides with harsh new commercial realities? Welcome to Manzano, Italy's chair-production capital, as it is battered by cheaper Chinese rivals."

I was discussing this with PM sometime last week: nowadays, it looks like every journalist, analyst, and their mothers are making a big hoo-hah over the inevitable rise of China. "The East is Red! Really, it is. This time, we're positive," seems to be the general consensus.

But surely, one can find better (or at least more interesting) evidence for China's unstoppable achievement of success and superpowerdom than the attack of the Chinese Chairmakers. Uh...like the magnificent Three Gorges Dam China has recently built. Never mind the nation's small problem with female infanticide and an excess of men. Or the somewhat frightening tendency for toxins to find their way into baby milk powder factories. And as a company official said following the tiny accident at one of China's petrochemical plants, "people shouldn't worry about the orange cloud."