Our World

Seriously, WHERE'S CHINA??

So this weekend during football, I saw a commercial that conjured up two distinct thoughts in my mind. The commercial is an advertisement for Fed-Ex. A manager is talking to his staff and remarks "Fed-Ex now delivers to over two hundred cities in China. John, put a push-pin in China." John, a staff member, walks over to a world map and places a pin in. "John, that's Russia," his manager says. John takes the push pin out, looks confusedly at the map for a bit, and then rips it down and "faints" to try to distract his co-workers from the fact that he doesn't know where China is. This brought up these two points for me:
1) It is a brutal reality that a lot of people are just plain incompetant when it comes to basic geography. China has over a billion people in it and takes up 9.5 million square kilometers of Asia, but it wouldn't surprise me if most people still couldn't find it on a blank map. In a recent survey, only 3 in 10 Americans could find Iraq on a map. Maybe we should show our citizens the countries we're invading, BEFORE we invade them.
2) On the flip side, it is amazing (even if it is exaggerated) that Fed-Ex now ships to two hundred cities in China. I cannot name ten cities in China, let alone two hundred! This is a perfect example of how globalization has transformed the international economy. We can now order anything, from basically anywhere, and ship it almost anywhere in the world. Just imagine a large, oddly-colored truck driving through your city with a language on it that you have no idea how to read. The people of China now have Fed-Ex, McDonalds, and the NBA. The world really IS flat.

posted by Anonymous @ 9/25/2006 10:29:00 PM