Page from brother-in-law Mike's Two Volume "A Concordance to Lu-Shih Ch'un-Ch'iu"

I once asked my brother-in-law, Mike, Culley Jane’s older brother, if he thought China was trying to take over the world.

He said no.

I asked him why?

“Because,” he said, “the rest of the world is not Chinese. That's just the way the Chinese are."”

I figure he knows what he’s talking about. He’s kind of an expert on China. He has a PhD in their ancient language and lived and taught in Taiwan for 23 years.

Mike and sister-in-law Betsy were over to the house this past week for Culley Jane's birthday. I asked him about the Chinese word Chi. In the last philosophical paper Leibnitz wrote before he died in 1716, he said the Chinese concept of Chi came as close as you could get to what he’d been trying to get at his whole life — the essence of it all. He had to invent a new language to describe it, calculus.

Mike said Chi was the ancient Chinese word for “breath.” (It’s probably not relevant, but I notice that the prefix of the word “China” is Chi, and Chicago, too.)

Maybe China does not want to “take over” the world, but it’s certainly spreading… Belt and Road, BRICS… spreading like breath, filling the room. But not spreading the way we've been doing it.

Unlike America, which has 750 extraterritorial military bases in 80 countries scattered across the globe, China has one, in Djibouti

Unlike America, China is not dropping bombs in the west Asian wars. But the presence of its breath saturates the air.

My main source of information about China is Kevin Warmsley. He grew up in Florida, worked for Wall Street investment and hedge funds and now lives in China where he hosts a YouTube podcast called Inside China Business.

The impression I get from him is that China now makes pretty much all of the things that we need here in America to continue living the American Dream. We used to joke about “Chinese products,” those plastic toys and trinkets at the five and dime. But nobody who knows what’s going on is joking anymore.

Bombs and battlefield surveillance systems… communications, logistics, protective domes… all now require quantum age production processes with quantum age elements — the “Rare Earths,” a group of 17 minerals grouped together in the middle of the Periodic Table. Formed in the Earth's molten core, they osmotically gravitate through layers of rock until expelled onto the surface of the planet in volcanic eruptions. They're not "rare," but are scattered and expensive to mine and purify. They first became commercially significant in the age of color television. They lubricate the movement of electrons through our modern world. Before we "de-industrialized," we mined and processed our own Rare Earths. But now China controls 90 percent of the world’s supply and won't sell us any that we intend to use for military purposes. To build new age bombs, we need China’s permission to breathe life into our plans.

Trump and Xi Jinping had a one-on-one to discuss the subject last week and came to some sort of an agreement; apparently agreeing to share some air cleansed of bad breath, which sounds kind of like something that Leibnitz, an Irenicist, would have said. A little progress, but in the grand scheme of things, never none.