to find out what the gift meant to them, did it affect their lives, did it change their fortunes. that is what the book is about. >> thank you very much for your time. >> c-span local content vehicles are traveling the country visiting cities and towns as we explore our nation's history. some of the authors to have touched upon it through their work. this weekend on book tv we take you to downtown indianapolis for a look at the new monument memorial library. ..

>> lee always brought in his midwestern groups and oches wrote about i understand and indianapolis specifically. if i way read a quote, many people ask why this is here in indianapolis, and i have many different answers, and then i find this great quote that says all my jokes are indianapolis. all my attitudes are indianapolis. if i ever severed myself from indianapolis, i'd be out of business. what people like about me is indianapolis. we took that as the green light

to establish this vonnegut library here in nips. we have a reading room, a gallery, and a gift shop in which i'll share details about today. this is a kurt vonnegut time lien. i'll read the quote at the top of the beautiful painting which was created by the artist, chris king, and by a scholar named rodney allen, and they both lived in louisiana. "all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. they can look at all the different moments just the way ce can look at a stretch of the rocky mountains for instance and they can see how the moments are. it's just an illusion here on earth. once a moment is gone, it's gone

forever. something's that unique about the timeline is we start from the right side and move to the left. one thing we wanted to mention about this quote is we hope that vonnegut would know that while he may think that or may have thought once a moment a gone, it's gone forever, we like to think the moment of kurt vonnegut lives on forever here at the library. he went to cornell university, studying chemistry. he did not plan to go into architecture like his father, but he did think he would move into a science career and discover that he was not interested in doing that. he enlisted in the army in world war ii, and i'd like to point out a moment here on the

timeline that's very important in a life of kurt vo, and that is 1944. he is dying from an overdose probably intentional of alcohol and sleeping pills. he enters combat in europe and is captured and he is riding in ray boxcar with other american pow to dresden a supposed safe german city unlikely to be bombed. it was not a military target. as vonnegut road in on a train, he was able to view the beautiful city and then he was placed in a house where the rest of the pow's were held. we have an exhibit called. dresden visit that's really his world war ii experience that

became so important in his writing and his world view later in his life. i'll start with his -- a photo taken right after he was released as a prisoner of war along with fellow prisoners. we also have his purple heart that was donated by his son, mark vonnegut, and he received the purple heart for frostbite, and kurt vonnegut was embarrassed to receive the purple heart for frostbite when so many of his friends had suffered from other types of difficult problems and diseases. we have a fine first edition of the books sauter house five. it's the most well-known book written by kurt vonnegut of his

30 pieces of writing he completed. this is the most famous. >> why? >> why was it famous? let me give you a little bit history of what happened to him in germany in my impressions of why it affected people so much. vonnegut, as i read, was taken to the house and while he was in dresden, the allies bombed the city and his own countrymen as well as allies bombed this city. it was a horrible bombing. it was a literally a fire storm, and tens of thousands of people were killed, and these were noncombatants, women and children, and old people, and vonnegut was his past as a prisoner was to go out and remove the bodies, you know, from these burning buildings,

and he also was required to bar ri the dead -- bury dead bodies of women and children, and that affected his life tremendously. he came back from his world war ii experience being completely against war. he was searching for peaceful resolutions to conflict and supported honesty and other approaches to solving problems. i will also point out a photo that was taken after he came back from the war. he got married to jane cox vonnegut who was from indianapolis as well. this photo was taken on their honeymoon. he's in uniform. they had three children, mark, eddy, and nanny. then many years later, his sister, alice, dies just a day

or two after her husband died in a freak train accident. alice had four children and three of them came to live with the vonnegut's family so they had quite a large household, seven children, and vonnegut at that time was writing books that at that time were less familiar, but he had published several books and articles for magazines as well as working a job as a car salesman. the experience of writing about dresden and what happened to him was tremendously difficult for vonnegut. it took him about 20 years to be able to publish the books. jane, his wife, had, you know, encouraged him to write it. she worked as his editor on the book.

she asked questions and got clarity on issues and helped him to retrieve a lot of those memories that he had reprezzed -- repressed. because of the family situation with the addition of more children and the success of publishing books, his marriage with jane was rocky. just his daughter, eddy, mentioned about a month ago that that experience and in the publishing of the book and all that steam brought to vonnegut contributed to their marriage dissolving, and at that time vonnegut had met the photographer, joel cremmens, and it was the only other person

married to. i'll move you hear to the political activity exhibit, and vonnegut continued to talk about his interests in finding peaceful solutions to conflict. i think that's another thing that made him very popular during the vietnam years and after and this photo, which was given to us by the "new york times," was taken after the gulf war, and there's vonnegut at columbia university, and, you know, i'm sure it was a long crowd and to his dying day, he attracted a large crowd. i have been told he was like a rock star coming into his

different speeches in large auditoriums, always filling the auditoriums. here we are in the art gallery of portion of the library. i want to show you a vonnegut float that's signed and given to us by his artistic collaborate tore. i don't know what it is about hoosiers, but wherever you go there's always a hoosiers doing something very important there. this was from cat's cradle, and it was an important exchange that the character has with a fellow controversialer on a plane, and that fellow traveler gives this quote. next, we have possibly his most famous piece of artwork. vonnegut in his humor, he associated the asterisk with his

future. we actually have used this asterisk in other pieces of our exhibits including our timeline, which you may have thought had stars in the sky, but they are actually vonnegut's asterisks in the sky. we also have life is no way to treat an animal. this is the tombstone for his famous character who appeared in many, many of his books. it is understood that this is based on vonnegut himself, and interestingly the character died at the age of 84, and vonnegut also happened to die at the age of 84. >> what did he die from? >> he collapsed.

he fell down the steps of his new york city home, and he went into a coma and never came out of that coma. he often joked that cigarettes would kill him and the warning label on the cigarette package said that they would kill him, and they had not yet done so, but he actually happened to be smoking a cigarette while standing on the steps. so next we have here two pieces of artwork created and morelly is an hon their board member, a close friend of kurt vonnegut. they shared a close friend, sidney, who wrote the introduction for the book, but these two pieces of art, on the

occasion of vonnegut's birthday was created in 2003 as a gift to vonnegut, and then the second was created when morally found out that vonnegut had died, and that was in 2007. we are in the front of the kurt vonnegut of the library, and in the gallery room, we have kurt vonnegut's typewriters used in the 1970s. this was donated to us by his daughter nanny. he wrote, you know, many of his more familiar books in the 1970s. we're happy to have this typewriter. he was not a fan of high technology and he did not use a computer. he preferred to use the typewriter through his day. he liked to work in his home on

an office chair and a coffee table. he would slump over his typewriter. he -- vonnegut would go out into the world every day. he talks about how he had learned that you can buy postage stamps over the internet, and he just thought that was horrible because then, you know, if he chose that route, he would not have the every day experience of going to the post office, and those every day experiences and the people he encountered in his daily walks were the basis for some of his stories. he met a number of very interesting characters in new york city, and going out and meeting people, you know, was a way for him to capture new material for his works. vonnegut is timeless because these issues, i mean, we still have the same issues.

we're still suffering with war, disease, death, father and famine, environmental issues. he said, you know, your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you. he felt we should take care of the planet. these issues, you know, have resurfaced, and it does not look like we've found any liable solutions to these problems, so, you know, i think his work is timeless. >> c-span local convent vehicles are traveling the country visiting cities and towns looking at the nation's history and some of the authors who have written about it. for more information go to c-span.org/lcv. >> walter, why a nonfiction? >> well, the truth was is it's for my son, and eight years ago on the night my son was born,

i'm going to write a book that will last his whole life. i'm coming back from the hospital and it's that moment you can dream anything for your president. your child can be the president or a generous person. with that, i'll write a book that lasts his whole life, and i wrote rules for him to live buy. there's pictures of it. i wanted is i wanted to write rules down. one, love god. two, be nice to the fat kid in class. things that are important to know, but the truth is i knew nothing about being a father. a friend of mine told me an amazing story about the wright brears and -- brothers and every time they went to fly a plane, they had enough terrible for crashes. i said i loved that story. i want me son to hear that story, my daughter. i want them to know if they have a dream and they work hard, they

can do anything in this world, and i said that's the book i'll write. not a book of rules, but a book of heros. it's 50 heros from rosa parks to mr. rogers, all showing what we're capable of in our best days. >> who was barbara johns? >> she's a teenager, and i wanted the book to have famous people. it has someone like martin luther king, j.r. or abraham lincoln, but she's a high school student, a witty civil rights activist. she, at a time when in 1951 basically saw a school buss ride by her. her bus was broken done. this was full of the white kids going to the white school. her school had no books or materials, and she organized a walk out. we're going to protest this and say forget about it.

she's one of the unknown people and her test case as they walked out was one of the cases used in brown vs. board of education. where did it come from? a teenager. a teenager is one of the people responsible for it. the book is filled -- there's a guy named frank, and he's a police officer. he found out about a boy with leukemia who wanted to be a police officer. he had a motorcycle course and motorbike uniform for the boy. and frank finds out the boy with this disease goes into a coma. the police officer goes to the hospitalroom and says to the boy while he's unconscious and puts motorcycle wings on him. he tells the family and puts the wings on his chest. this is a true story, the boy wakes up out of his coma and smiles. he eventually dies, but on the way home from the funeral, he looks at the buddy and said we

made that kid happy for one day. let's do that for other kids. that's how the make a wish foundation is born. i never knew that story. i wanted my son to know that story. this is about celebrating these people that can just take one dream and share with someone else and change the entire world. >> only a few minutes with you, and we'd like to hear who your heros are. numbers are on the screen. if you live in the east and central time zone and mountain and pacific, go ahead start calling in now. who's on the cover? >> it's funny. everybody thinks it's my son. i have two sons. my editor wanted me to pick between my two kids, but you can't do that. my kids are in the back, but i will say, it's a family affair. the last heros in the look is my favorite hero, my mother, and my mom died two years ago from

breast cancer and before she died, my publisher was shutting down, and this is early in my career and i didn't know if anybody would take over my contract. i was terrified. i called my mom, and i said, mom, i'm nervous. she said i would love you if you were a garbageman. she was not taking a create at that, but she didn't care what i was. i love you if you were a garbageman. the best hero in the book are on the last two pages. they are blank. your heros photo and story here. i promise you, get this book and put their picture in there and write a sentence about nor father, grandmother, or a military member in your family, that's the most beautiful page. i wanted this book to give to anyone at any age and say thank you for being my hero.

you included two presidents in the book. who are they in >> there's no politics, but i included george h. w bush, and president obama, but not because of political reasons. bush is in there for the story when he was the youngest pilots in world war ii and his plane was going down, two men on the plane, and as the plane crashes, and crashing into the ocean, he maneuvers the plane so they get out before he can and uses that moment of selflessness and he jumps out and is crashing into the ocean. he is crying, terrified, and when i saw him and heard this story he still thinks of the guys all the time. he became the president of the united states and never told that story or promoted himself on that. i want my son to have that humility, and barak obama is in the book, again, not because of

political reasons. nobody knows where he will be in the end, but what he represents is one the greatest ideals in all america and that's that anyone can be president. i want my son to know and daughter to know that anyone can be president. they were put in there for nonpolitical reasons. >> how did you get to know george bush? >> i write thrillers and mysteries for a living which means i spend my day talking to imaginary people. i got a letter that said i like your books a lot, and it was written by george hw bush. i sent him free books, and he's been a good friend and helped me with research. >> first call on heros from maryland. go ahead please. >> caller: yes, brad, i want to thank you for creating such a wonderful book. i think it's extremely important

that people really understand that, you know, heros are not just the people who are famous, but i liked that you have people who are not famous and kids have an opportunity and anyone giving this gift to their family to let them know ordinary people can do be truly extraordinary by pursuing their goals and dreams and really going after it and make a difference. thank you for this and this is something i'll share with my family. >> thank you. >> now, who is your hero? >> caller: my hero would be my mother. she was an african-american woman from the south, 9th grade education, raised my brother and and i and now i have my masters degree and my brother trades on wall street. >> all right. >> that's exactly right. we all know and say, oh, our heros are martin luther king

j.r. or eleanor roosevelt, but the real heros are who we live with every day. if you want to talk about the hero i spent my time with is my oldest son. i wrote the book for him, and this is the moment i recently gave him the book, and it's a moment i waited for eight year. i wrote it for my son, and i'm presenting it to him, and he doesn't care about eleanor roosevelt or rosa parks. he goes looking for the athletes in the book and he's flipping through and finds roberto clementi. i told being a professional athlete doesn't make you a better person. it means nothing being on the best sellers list. he reads this and roberto is in

the book not because he plays baseball, but because there was an earthquake in nick wag ray and he sends three plane loads of food to the victims. all three plane loads were stolen. he sent a fourth plane. he got on the plane himself to make sure it got there. he gets on the plane and it crashes in the ocean killing everybody on board. he's not a hero because he died, but why he died on board. my son reads this and i'm waiting for him to be inspired and he looks up and says, dad, this is sad. i said and i realized i broke his heart for the first time. the next day i think the book backfired in my face. i don't put the book out. he comes racing into the room and grabs the book by himself and said who are we reading about tonight? i said what about row beer toe?

he said i like him because he gave his life to save the other people. that's a way to share -- you know, we complain there's no good heros in the world, we focus on celebrities, but we have a say in who our kids emulate, and this is my say. >> florida, you have 15 seconds. >> caller: thank you very much. my hero is a man named -- [inaudible] this was a man from an old white protestant family and he saved basically the intellectual class and so many others using so many -- [inaudible] he got passports and visas for them to get out of france and nazi-occupied france into spain and eventually to the united states and saved them and saved

their work for the rest of the world. that is a hero of mine. >> thank you, caller. >> a great hero. in fact, we put in the book in that list that you have, my favorite person is meet. there's an anne frank diary and she's the woman who saved and's family from the nazis. they raid her house, and at that moment, she can say, oh, i can't know they were up there. she never poleses, and what she does is tries to bribe the nazis. don't take the family away. they go through her stuff and the one thing they discord is a one red book, and's diary. miep gies is a woman people don't know about, but she preserved the diary and when otto frank said my daughter is

dead, she never read the book, handed it to her father saying this is your daughter's legacy to you, and that's the reason we have anne frank's diary. >> very quickly before this next panel starts, how much research, political research, goes into your thrillers? >> you know, listen, i wish we didn't live in a world where we get our jokes and news from comedians and just get jokes, but i realize over the years people want the real fracts out of my books, and i take that seriously and that trust seriously. it takes six months before i start writing. if i'm showing you the secret tunnels before the white house, i'll show you where they are, i like getting it right. >> how many books have you sold? >> of this one? ten copies to my family. the publishers say we have x-millions of copies in print. the only ones that matter are

the ones for my family. my mom, god bless her. i went to borders head quarters a couple years back and they said guess where your book sells more than anywhere else? i said, i don't know, new york city? no. washington, d.c.? no. the number one place where my book sold is in florida border, one mile from the furniture store where my mom used to work. my mom beat 8 million new yorkers and that's the power of a mother fighting for her son. >> here is his new nonfiction book, "heros for my son." >> in his book, zach ri says that the united states and chinese economy are so intertwined that disrupting either one would have tragic consequences. the carnegie counsel is the host

of this event. it's about an hour. >> good afternoon. i'm joanne myers and i'd like to thank you all for joining us. today, it is a special pleasure to be introducing our speaker. zach is someone who i've known for quite some time. he has a wide range of interest and has complete information on many topics. his articles appeared in "wall street journal, "new york times," and "washington post." we are dlieted that he is here today. in his most recent book own how china and america became one economy and why the world's prosperity depends on it, that draws on his expertise of research where he's an amist of

economic and political trends. to write about what happens when to countries, one a superpower, the other on the its way, are dependent on one another for their economic well-being. he traces a 20 year history beginning with the protests in 1989 to tell us the incredible story about the developing country that opened doors to the west and allowed a market economy to flourish. those his remarkable tales accelerated by the admission of china into the world trade organization in 2001, in the intervening years before china joined the wto, the chinese leadership adopted a policy of aggressive economically forum and courted u.s. companies such as federal express, kentucky fried chicken, avon, and wal-mart. nobody realized how important this would be for china's success and growth. however, as a reading reveals while china was a producer of

low-cost goods and consumer banker to america, neither the governments of china, the united states, or populations of either country saw the implications where this relationship was aheading as these two countries were becoming more and more reliant on one another. today, both countries are in an unfamiliar and challenging position. on one side of the ocean, there's china questioning the wisdom of their union with the united states and on the other hand, there's the united states, which raises the level of depend sigh raising levels of anxiety. this enhanced the economy but undermined the sovereignty. i wonder if it's worth to redefine the relationship with china assuming it would not cause greater instability in the world. what would the implications be for the future of our global economies? zach just may have the answer. please join me in giving him a

warm welcome to a very special guest. [applause] >> thank you. you've done a wonderful job summarizing the book, so i think we'll go right to questions. [laughter] in fact, you've heard about joel and the carnegie counsel and i was here 16 years ago as a graduate student speaking about something which i wish i could remember, and it's interesting to come back here over the years to speak to you today. i wrote a few books in the past decade of 2000, a decade which i suppose is remaining nameless, although, it's becoming known as the zeros, and one was about religious coexistence, and then i wrote this book about the relationship between china and the united states, topics which on the face have absolutely no relationship to one another, but

what is interesting about that is in many ways, those are the two issues that have animated a lot of global politics, and have led to no source of agitation on the part of people throughout the world except that the relationship between the faiths, the religious three religions and challenges in terrorism some of which stems from that is very much an issue of the past. that doesn't mean that it's not also a crucial issue of the president in the future, but it definitely has its roots in a history. whereas the evolving relationship of china and the united states and the evolution of china as an economic superpower is very much in my view the issue of the future, and the cliche and truism that in so far as that we are trapped

in the issues of the past versus focusing on the issues of the future, we do not develop the kind of dinism and initiative to construct that future, so part of the concern and part of the reason that i wrote this book is a way of saying that while a lot of our public attention has gone to the crisis of 9/11 and beyond, that what was happening while that public attention was focused on iraq and afghanistan and terrorism and security issues that stem from religious tension, that the evolution of china was happening and if not beneath the surface then certainly not receiving the acute tension that that conflict was, and some of that is quite understandable, war, death, violence, troops in action, security have a way of focusing

the mind and grabbing attention whereas fuzzy things like economics and money flows and capital unless it's a dramatic event like the collapse of lehman brothers and are your atms going to work tomorrow don't gain the same attention. if it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead. that's what i know from writing books. when i wrote "peace be upon you" religious coexist en, it didn't get the sales that the publishers or i would have like. it was about peace and that's boring. people talk about the weather and go to sleep. you know, that's peace. in the paperback version it's called peace be upon you 14th century of conflict and cooperation presumably under the idea to get conflict in there you can animate the spirit of readers and buying the book. i suggested it should have been called 14th century of religious

conflict with celebrities, but that was rejected on the grounds of irrelevance. i came to write this current book, and part of that came out of an economic background and some of a background of managing an investment fund for the chinese u.s. growth fund for chinese and u.s. companies one way or another benefits from china's economic growth, and some were mentioned in passing that i'll talk a little bit about as we get further into this, and so a couple contentions around this. one is that the emerging relationship between china and the united states is the defining relationship of the increase generation -- next generation and the emergence of china as a global force is the defining change factor of this part of the century. i was told once that if you make predictions about the future,

just don't give dates, so when i say this part of the century, i'm not entirely clear how long this part of the century lasts, but sort of for now and until then. our ability to manage and in this case the united states or our citizens of the world ability to manage this evolution constructively is going to define in large measure whether or not this is a peaceful rise, whether or not this rise is one that enhances global prosperity, or triggers a next wave of global tension. i don't have a prediction about that, but i'm simply saying as the change factor to be grappled with, how that change is managed internationally, domestically, collectively i think will shape the economic security and the security of the united states as well as that of china and that

of the world and that we are at a particular point. none of this is to say the issues animated us and continue to animate us in the foreign policy realm about the challenges of global terrorism are not acute and not important, but it's only to say that that which seems most acute and important right now i don't believe is going to change our domestic lives like the rise of china, and that even if you believe those things are important, this is something to be attended to. again, what's difficult about is it there's an e mori my sis to it. i want to go back for a moment and talk about how this evolved because understanding how it evolved in this particular case is absolutely central to understanding what actually reare in right now and what to do about it going forward. i don't believe that history is predictive. i don't think history repeats # itself. i think historians repeat each other, but it can be a source of

information and awareness about the path that we're on. one marker in this which was unnoticed at the time was as joanne mentioned the december of 2001 joining of china to the world trade organization. now, if you remember in december of 2001, the attention of the united states was almost entirely on just sending troops to afghanistan, and one again, of course, the attention of the united states in the foreign policy context was just sending troops to afghanistan. even that in the case, a country joining a deliberative body with no geographic center represented by trade ministers of the world is not usually the source of pulitzer prize winning journalism or stirring histories so that china's joining the wto in december 2001 even under the best of circumstances was not attended by fireworks of the world has changed, but in the

greater scheme of things, oh, my god the world did in fact change, and that was a dramatic inflexings point. that was the most important statutory moment that helps explain where we are today, that this really began after 1989 and in many ways as a result of how the chinese leadership managed the political protest. now, i think that when people talk about the u.s. chinese relationship, certainly my sense of doing enough a.m. radio and talking around the country is people are aware china evolved as a power and there's this relationship between chai that and the united states, but it's a negative sense. china makes painted dry walls, poisonous dog food, led painted toys, they keep currency

undervalued and develop a huge amount of reserves based on a devalue of currency and flood the market with cheap goods for the erosion of the american manufacture. that narrative and story is ensconced in politics and americans. the chinese have their version of this relationship which we thought america was a good place to invest and if we brace the american model of capitalism, we would have a constructive pathway to the future and low and behold, the crisis of 2008 shows just how misguided that was and once again the west is trying to take china and steeling money and returning nothing and the goal long term is to detach from this pathway, go it alone, and once again become the middle kingdom of peace, prosperity, and cultural dominance globally. if you talk to the publics of either part of this equation, you don't get a warm and fuzzy

feeling of the relationship, but an uncomfortable feeling and as of late, the chinese leadership has become aggressive. there was a moment at the cope hagueen summit where a prime minister waved his finger at president obama about the relationship of china. it was a protocome and prime ministers don't lecture and the chinese prime minister which the chinese of nothing else are rigid to diplomacy and hu jintao visited the white house on the white house lawn, there were few what would have seen to the american audience protocol accidents when president bush grabbed an exit stage left and there was a heck leer in the background that said free tie belt and one other all of which

were seen as less than a protocol in the unite and no big deal for those who studied the legacy of george burr, but that was my one real part dig of the evening, i really -- i'm better now. for the chinese, there was seen as a very purposeful of humiliation and sticking it to the president showing we were bigger than them. for him a lecture the president of the united states was a big deal. you had a lot of comments recently about the currency issues about their problem, our problem, attend to the motes in our own eye before attending to china and the relationship of google and china and our version of the internet and you have no right to tell us about your version and impose it upon us, and this is just another act of culture em pearl yalism. to understand this relationship, you have to grapple with the reality that it involve the

first because the chinese wanted it, not the united states. it involves after the aftermath of the protest, they authorize the the violent so presentation of the protests are at a cross roads, and they have the example of the soviet union in mind which is too much political reform, leading to chaos and collapse, and by the way, later in the 90s there's the example of post-soviet russia which is too much economic reform leading to chaos and collapse. okay, we can have political reform or economic reform, but we cannot have neither. we will shut the door to political reform. you will not be able to speak about your government if you are a chinese citizen, you cannot gain say what is done, but we will engage in a hypercharged economic reform in the belief that if you create prosperity and affluence in a market fashion, you will maintain stability and a low for the

continuance of party leadership. in 1989 if you are china and embrace the market as they did, embracing the market means you embrace the united states because in the 1990s particularly with the end of the cold war, the market is large, the global market is largely defined by global capitalism imlating from the united states and wall street before wall street became, you know, as much of a dirty word when wall street wasn't a dirty word. it comes and goes. china begins to woo the united states. he says, wouldn't it be great if we could have a couple tens of billions of dollars in foreign reserves and sell products? fast forward 20 years later, they have $2 #.2 trillion in reserves, a trade advantage or deficit in its advantage with the united states and chinaing thes for 10% of all global trade

getting close to the height of the 20th century. in order to get to that point, it required china not only to woo american companies, but for american companies to invest that china, and in many ways that's the missing part of the story because beginning in 1989 and stemming through 2008 and you won't be able to find the calculations because they don't exist on any government data, but by my calculations, u.s. companies were at large and some multinationals invested about a trillion dollars in china, building factories or federal express buying up airlines in southeast asia in order to build up a network that would allow it to function on the mainland of china. a trillion dollars for an economy the size of china in the 1990s and even into the 2000s is an extraordinary amount of money.

it would have been on percentage terms over that period of time certainly close to $20 trillion if you thought about it in american terms. it would have paid for our health care costs, you know, twice. that's a lot of money. the fact that china was able to woo that money is one of the fundamental reasons why china now has the ability to have a $2.4 trillion surplus in reserves and why it's a manufacturing power house and why it's ability to build out internal infrastructure because in many ways they piggy backed on the intellectual property, and we can get to that piracy and copying, but certainly by the intelligent property of the west and also consume the capital in order to build upon itself. the tradeoff for the u.s. companies was positive. a lot of companies that went to china initially in the 1990s or the late 1980s are the companies that are feeling left out of the

equation in the 1990s, they are the old economy companies that everybody in the 1990s were saying were has-beens. you know, they were the people who made stuff that wasn't like cell phones, and so it's easy to do that in a talk, but, you know, it's a talk about china and that's where all the cell phones are made including the apple ipad. it was the cat pillars of the world, it was the general motors of the world. it was young brands couched of such as kentucky fried chicken who felt they got up on a stage saying i had no business plan, just a great idea orphan transforming the future and walked out of the room with $10 billion in startup capital who others were told their businesses were or cay yak and their product lines were old.

they all thought, okay, china was the hail mary pass. we have to find growth in order to impress shareholders, so go to china. companies have been going to china for years and losing money. investing in china was not thought of as forward thinking, and what they do is not only do they transform china and create a consumer culture industrial no-how in -- know-how in china because the story that continues to be untold is how much the evolution of china is a domestic consumption story in china. either the government consuming or people consuming increasingly more relative to what they had been, not relative to a bar of how much they should, and the example of kentucky fried chicken is the perfect one. kentucky fried chicken in 1989 is nobody's idea of a cool, sexy, hot, or well-run company.

it's a division that decides to allow kentucky fried chicken to grow in the mainland having done okay in hong kong and other parts of southeast asia on the assumption that if you get chinese people to ease fried chicken, you can get them to smoke, so it authorizes local managers to grow in china and gives them a lot. unlike mcdonalds that is centralized, kentucky fried chicken didn't have a strong -- they allow managers to open up a store in beijing and they throw out the rule book. this is a different brand in china. it's not called kentucky fried chicken balk that's like calling something newark's fried rice in shanghai. they call it kfc, which is also meaningless, but it's meaning lessly meaningless.

they rent a 5,000 square foot store, 500 yards away from the square and they spend millions of dollars renovating it and each door has pictures of the united states. one floor has the statue of liberty and the golden gate bridge and scenes of american life. they are going to brand it as the experience of a market. now, granted this happens right before the protest. they had begun this direction. they are going to have table service and waiters smiling and they rebrand the colonel because he didn't play well to test groups anywhere in southeast asia. when the first opens up in hanoy, there were riots in vietnam because they thought the franchise was descending the memory of ho chi menh.

they rebranded the colonel and now he looks like if he and full man shoe had an affair and because they are able to rebrand this, they are able to charge four time as much money for the same food. they say they think this is an experience the modern world. they keep coming back and it's a lot of money for them to do that. it's like what you spend on all your entertainment in a month, and the franchise grows and grows throughout the 90s so that even though by the middle of this past decade, kentucky fried chicken represented 6% of all of yum's brands including pizza hut. in the process, it became a sowter of fast food in china.

i mean, there was no fast food in china until now although, all-foods was probably fast, but there was no franchise or restaurants or no branding and marketing. now, i suppose from one perspective you say this is all negative, the worst aspects of consumer culture into a chinese context. the world is the world is the world. it's the world that we do in fact inhabit, and the transformation of china was a product of a lot of companies going in and creating these motifs in ways of acts that were different than what went on in china at any other point in society in which they began to innovate in their own context. you know, what that then created in terms of the relationship was a lot of chinese companies making stuff for sale in the united states, but as long as the chinese woke up and venture

capital their own factories and figured out what products to make that were appealing to a u.s. audience, most of what was produced was produced because american pews producers set up factories and made stuff they made elsewhere. whether this trade was good is an interesting question, but it's true that those trends were in place long before china is on the horizon because before china it was mexico and ross perot making jobs go south and before that it was taiwan and south korea so that the murnlg of labor to lower cost areas has been going on for decades. it's not a product of china even though china is the latest it ration of it. this is seen as a system that kind of underminds the american manufacturing base and enhances the competitive abilities of china, but in my view, it's a

system essentially of capital on ideas in motion in a way that national statistics do a poor job of showing, that much of the trade deficit assumes that every dollar of trade with china is a dollar that leaves the united states and goes to china, but if 15% of that trade deficit is wal-mart sourcing its goods, a lot of that money doesn't go to china. it goes, yes, to wal-mart. it goes to people working on the port of long beach offloading the booze. it goes to where warren buffet ships the goods throughout the country. it doesn't go in all that direction. it's not even clear, in fact, where things are made, even though they are prescribed to one country or another. if ge makes a washing machine with plastics that are initially made in malaysia and circuit boards produced in taiwan and

some cloth that was sourced from cambodia with initially having been grown in texas, but then gets assembled partly in a plant in southern china and then shipped to a plant in northern china via hong kong which is a chinese export to hong kong and then an export to china, and then sent to the united states, where was that thing made? by a company who shares trade on the new york stock exchange. if there's a phone and you have the same thing, it's sent to the united states for a company that is incorporated in canada who shares trade on the new york stock exchange. the national trade statistics do a bad job in capturing that reality. they do a bad job of capturing capital emotion. you can see this more as a system. i want to do a brief thought experiment and talk quickly partly for effect. the numbers i'll give are not

actual, but they are representative. one of the only sources of growth from about 2003 until 2008 that wall street investment banks saw other than mortgage-backed securities was the possibility of doing banking and loan and lending and underwriting business in china because by the world trade organization, china had to allow these to come in. in 2003, morgan stanley seeing potential to do business with chinese companies that want to list shares or former state-owned enterprises reformed enough to turn to western capital marketings for infusion of capital, mar gone stanley decides to invest $5 billion in one of china's banks, which is does, and one of the banks then takes that $5 billion and disperses a series of loans, some to government-sponsored projects to build infrastructure, roads, rail, and urban infrastructure to create a