Reading Japan, understanding China

中原よ。

地球は冬で寒くて暗い。

ぢゃ。

さやうなら。

  

Nakahara, friend!

The earth is wintry, cold and dark.

Well then, good-bye.

I am reading Reischauer's history of Japan. Surprising that the Japanese use a supremely difficult writing system, worse than the Chinese. Europeans also used difficult systems in the past, like writing in Latin. But it was abandoned, the Japanese stuck with it. I also understood that the Chinese Communist Party is following the Japanese model of modernization, only that the Japanese were lucky to have the Americans to impose on them what they longed to do. For example, democracy and agrarian reform. The Chinese know that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not fit them, but they cannot find the way to wiggle out of the format and dissolve the Communist Party and reform in two or three competing parties. The West should not fear China. It is fated to become wealthy as Japan and South Korea, and then, stagnate. BTW, Nakahara was a poet, died at age thirty.