I find this very interesting. This will be me going off on a tangent of Westernization, or attempting to avoid doing so. This is some of the offerings of food during a corporate yacht event. It was quite a nice affair, including networking, speeches and general schmoozing. The food was a lovely array of tropical lychees, dragonfruit and melon. You can see here that there are also some strange (to a Westerner) dried fruit called waxberries. In contrast there are Pringles. But not just any Pringles...seaweed Pringles. Why? It is the Chinese-ifying of a most Western classic...or is it vice versa? Taking up on Western 'delicacies' of fast food and packaged junk food is the most prevalent way I see the Chinese trying to 'come into their own' globally. Now this may sound far-fetched, stemming from a simple picture of food...but it's an observation I've had of several things here.

Let's go further into the yin and yang of it: on one hand, there is the very convenient Wal-mart, a dept store that sells most everything, located in the lovely city I live in. On the other hand, there are dept. stores here where one must check out individually at every dept. and pay then and there. On one hand, everyone here drives a car or motorbike. On the other hand, some of the traffic rules are 'honk your horn until the pedestrian gets out of the way to avoid getting hit'. Then, with those same traffic rules, where people drive the opposite direction on a highway to get to a side street, are some high-tech hwy cameras to monitor the traffic (the irony?). I have heard on more than one occasion, "Oh this is good, but I don't know if it is good enough for a foreigner." WHAT? Why are there two standards for everything, doubling the way everything is done here? That is something I fail to understand. So you see, one side is, China is trying very hard to go global. The other side is, in parallel, opposite standards exist. So one can never really be sure about the actual outcome when one thing is being stretched by another in a different direction. Please do NOT get me wrong. I am not saying one is better than the other (East or West). I am merely saying each are different, and I see the tension and the pull, as China struggles to find its footing in globalization. In the West, we may scorn upon the Wal-marts and McDonald's spreading like wildfire, but it seems here, they proudly announce, "We even have a Wal-mart!".....anti-globalization activists beware!