What this portends for the world can be seen in the 2004 participation numbers at the annual international Science and Engineering Fair run by Intel the US semiconductor company. In the US, 65,000 students participated in local fairs to select finalists. In China, six million did.

More than 30 million people died of starvation while ‘China watchers’ debated whether hunger was, in fact, wide-spread at all.

The business of gold was in trouble. Northern Italy was home to over 10,000 jewelry manufacturers, most of them small-scale artisan outfits that, taken together, make up the largest gold jewelry industry in the world. But competition from China and Turkey was threatening to wipe them out. You could see the changes already in Italy’s demand for refined gold; in the last four years it had slumped from over 600 tons annually to around 350 tons. Camponovo saw little prospect for an improvement. Every year, he said, Chinese entrepreneurs and designers decended on the big jewelry fairs in northern Italian towns such as Vicenza to buy speciems to take home and reproduce at less than one-tenth of the Italian price.

the bonhomie was not sustainable. The illegal immigrants-turned-entrepreneurs began to put their former Italian bosses out of business. Of the 6,000 or so textile companies that existed in 2000, less than 3,000 remained in mid 2005. Several Italian companies with more than a hundred years of history are hanging on by a thread. The main reason for this is that whereas in the past only one part of the process of making a garment was outsourced to China, now almost every step in the production process is being moved offshore. As spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing moves to Wenzhou, the Chinese factory bosses in Prato are better suited to transition than their Italian counterparts.

Almost all of the value had been stripped out of the industry and he began telling people – only half in jest – that he would begin selling motorbikes by the kilogram, like pigs. “the ex-factory price of our cheapest model is rmb 25 per kilo. That is a bit more than a kilo of live pig.’ Said one of his deputies, Yang Zhou, during another of my visits to the plant.

But thirty-three months after starting at zero with a new company in the city of Wuhu on the banks of the Yangtze River, Chery had made its first car, a four-door saloon called the Chery that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Jetta, which at that time was China’s best-selling car. Suspicions were immediately raised, partly because Chery’s main investor, SAIC, was a joint venture partner of Volkswagen and partly because one of Chery’s top executives used to make the Jetta in China for Volkswagen’s subsidiary Audi. Volkswagen launched an investigation and found their own original parts inside the Chery.

‘China is a big family. We have 200 million middle school students. Every day 22,000 girls get married; 44,000 babies are born. We eat better since we opened China’s door. Every day we eat 1.6 million pigs and 24 million chickens. Our premier not only wants young people to have a chance to study and grown-ups to have jobs, he also has to take care of 20 million kids in kindergarten and 12 million people aged 80.

It occurred during the several weeks from mid February 2004 when, slowly at first but with mounting velocity, manhole covers started to disappear from roads and pavements all over the world. As Chinese demand drove up the price of scrap metal to record levels, thieves almost everywhere had sold them to local merchants who cut them up and loaded them onto ships to China.

In the years since, Sudan has become China’s largest overseas oil project and China has turned into Sudan’s biggest supplier of arms. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have added new impetus to the civil war between the north and south of the country which has already lasted for two decades. The money to buy those weapons, meanwhile, has come from oil revenues generated largely by the activities of the state-run China National Petroleum Corporation.

“I am from Sierra Leone, and the problem that is affecting us children is the war that forces us to run away form our homes, lose our families, and aimlessly roam the forests. As a result, we get involved in the conflict as soldiers, carriers of loads, and in many other difficult tasks. All this is because of starvation, the loss of our families, and the need to feel safe and be part of something when all else has broken down. I joined the army really because of the loss of my family and starvation. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my family. I also had to get some food to survive, and the only way to do that was to be part of the army. It was not easy bring a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don’t be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experiences is that revenge is not good. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I’ve come to learn tha tif I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end…”

UN peacekeeping behavior of the Jordanian peacekeepers themselves in Sierra Leone (they sold ammo and intelligence to the West Side Boys to enable them to attack the Nigerian UN peacekeeping force in return for conflict diamonds)

Add into that the recent diamond deals that the RUF have done with al-Qaeda operatives (conflict diamonds being an untraceable and unfreezable form of almost ready cash), then IMATT was in effect taking on the minions of Osama bin Laden and his world-terror network as well.

Where we have failed is understanding the high cost of intervention on the innocent bystanders

The conventional ‘Rules for Armed Combat’ have disappeared. Civilian populations, rather than being afforded protection, became the targets and tools of war. Murder, rape, mutilation, looting, abductions, human shields, child soldiers, land-mines, property destruction; Sierra Leone is rife with such issues.

In Sierra Leone, Britain achieved proof of concept, a test case exemplifying how war-termination and peace-enforcement can be successfully achieved. Sierra Leone had suffered over a decade of terrible trauma and pain at the hands of a wily, well-armed and entrenched group of rebels. Against all the odds, it has effectively been brought back into the community of peaceful nations.

In the telling of their story there is also the opportunity, indeed the need, to discuss the wider issues thrown up by this short chapter on the history of suffering in a country like Sierra Leone. That discussion in part concerns our response to the demands of international peacekeeping in strife-torn regions across Africa and in the wider, conflict-torn world.

The economics of a global economy demand a change in the way we think of managing the resources of the very globe this economy rests upon.

for the kid who's family was hurt or injured during this war, the concepts of democracy, WMD's etc are far to high-minded, all he/she knows is death has rained down in a greater way since the USA has been in Iraq than before

It proves the fallacy of thinking in relative terms. It is an adjustment; it is a very different world than a single super power where most of the innovation is coming from one place.

With the U.S. tied up in Iraq, and the general opinion being against the White Houses ill-conceived policies hopefully the message will be clear that there is no great Axis of Evil in existence.

Somewhere in the search for the active and imaginative life that is picturesque and full of poetical curiosity is the key to seeing beyond the fog, beyond the noise and gaining a glimpse of justice.

The government and the military have it all wrong, they still have not figured out that we live in a flat world and their power is simply growing less relevant.

It seems to me that while the last Century saw the sunset of Pax Britannica and the birth of the postwar American Empire, or as Charles Maier once called it, “the empire that dare not speak its name,” this new Century is not about borders but ideas.

Perhaps the best thing Japan could have done when Kim Jong’s son tried to sneak into Disneyland Tokyo was given him a VIP tour ;o)

“We can influence [the world] in a way that no other country can – Russia’s concepts and example will wilt before ours, if we have the vigor and farsightedness to see our place in the world.”

Over the last month, while working insane hours averaging probably close to 3 hours a night, traveling to NYC, London, Rome and Tokyo it seems like the world has further erupted with the goings on in Iraq, Korea and in Lebanon.

Sen. Jarrett Barrios was outraged that his son Nathaniel, a third-grader, was given a Fluffernutter sandwich at the King Open School in Cambridge. He said he plans to file legislation that would ban schools from offering the local delicacy more than once a week as the main meal of the day.

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society...