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Unfortunately, the market is limited to the small fraction of the population in coastal cities in the SE part of the country, and to a certain extent, Beijing, who have any sort of disposible income.

You're talking about approximately 100 mil. people here (a "small fraction" in China is still a large number of people), who enjoy a standard of living on par with Taiwanese or S. Koreans. 100 mil. people is almost as big as Japan's entire population or the entire US workforce. Those 100 mil. new bourgeois didn't even exist 20 years ago. As time goes on, you can expect about another 100-200 mil. Chinese to join China's middle class each decade. China is already the world's largest market for cell phones, refridgerators, air conditioners, light bulbs, etc. Pretty soon, it will replace Japan as #2 in PC's. In the meantime, today's Third World republics are so chaotic and dysfunctional they need one IMF bailout after another. Representative democracy in Third World countries is largely dysfunctional around the entire world.

Faulkner, why do you not address my other points? I noticed that you seem to focus solely on the economic dimension. Indeed, we must always consider it. However, the businessman who focuses solely on the economic dimension whilst ignoring the geopolitical dimension, while perhaps winning the gamble in the short term, is likely to experience untimely turn overs in the long term. We have seen it time and time again particularly during the 20th century. The most extreme examples were the businessmen dealing with Germany during the 1930s. Some of them not only lost big due to WWII, in some cases they were actually thrown in the slammer for treason.

That's the problem with most US businessmen these days (my / your peers). Most of them neither want to consider nor talk about the geopolitical dimension. They have become too $&@*$@ arrogant and confident in the West and in the particular form of capitalism that has come into vogue since the late 1980s (there are many forms after all, you know this to be true...). Indeed, it looked to many like this form defeated the East, but why then, is the East now ascendent? Perhaps the Sun Tzu way of looking at things? In point of fact, the "winning of the Cold War" was not nearly so clean a win as many think. Much of what happened 1988 - 1993 was very ambiguous and without a clear settlement or winner. Yet, many Westerners started to beat upon their chests and gloat - a bit too early I think.

Viewing what appears to be crystalizing as a very new world situation with the new century, any objective analyst would have to, at this point, admit that the sort of ubiquitous span of Western control via multinational corporations and Western based financial networks might have been just a bit oversold. Already we can see that the theories of Francis Fukuyama and Thomas L. Friedman have serious gaps and flaws. Once again, I suspect, we shall have to confront both geopolitical and economic conditions that are less than ideal for the free nations of the world. War? Perhaps. Pain? You bet. In any case, those few business people who bring themselves to consider other dimensions besides the economic one, and without wishful thinking, will be the overall winners as we proceed through the first real wave of serious global chaos since the 1940s.