At the airport a month or so ago, I had the misfortune of being bombarded with wall-to-wall CNN broadcasts about China’s “new direction”. I swear they must have a special airport-feed version of CNN designed specifically to implant concepts into the minds of weary travelers. The bit that I heard (I tried to avert my eyes from the Great Satan) was about how “China Is No Longer Communist.”

If their programming efforts are working, then this won’t be the first time you’ve heard about this massive re-branding initiative. And if it *is* the first time you’re hearing about it, then I can offer you an iron-clad money-back guarantee that this won’t be the last time you’ll hear about it.

Rumors of wars with China, I think, are old hat at this point. Their purpose was to build up a sort of nationalist sexual frustration between these two great empires so that the artificial media-induced wall could be ripped down in a deluge of cross-border spending and business fertilization across the Pacific Ocean.

Wafting over the horizon, I smell increasing media efforts not just to re-package China as a sexy capitalist wonderland, but quite possibly to build up China into the next tech boom area. There are just too many smelly developments all at once and too many oblique mentions of innovative Chinese tech companies penetrating all levels of the news (and I only barely follow news anymore) for my comfort.

When I gave into my crystal ball, I envision some kind of mid-level money bubble coalescing over Chinese tech stocks within 3-6 months and possibly lasting only as long as that in turn. As a result, you’re likely to see a hoard of bumbling American investors flush a bunch of money without a great deal of forethought into the Chinese economy - and thereby out of the American economy!

Will this compound existing American financial problems? More than likely. I also see these trends colliding with an increasing need to revert to community currencies to stem the tide of money hemorrhaging out of neighborhoods, cities, regions, and the country itself.

Worst case scenario, China beats the United States without ever firing a single shot, exploding any missiles, or running any Americans over with tanks. All they have to do is convince us to send them our money. But that of course is us acting under the assumption that it isn’t American companies (or at least the same sources of money and power) who are in fact behind the Chinese tech boom that we’re about to see happen. In which case, it will be - once again - American companies who are bleeding value out of America, and Americans who blindly oblige them at the promise of some easy money to be had. And all for what, so we can buy more cars?