Raise the red flag

I'm taking a few days off to finish up the last of my Christmas protesting, so posting is going to be light for the next few days. Before I sign off here, I'd like you all to consider this alarming geopolitical development:

All that may sound surprising, because China is a country where barely any women used cosmetics a decade ago. When the authorities stopped discouraging lipstick and other bourgeois displays of beauty in the early 1990s, Chinese women were eager to embrace the aesthetics of the modern world. As a result, the beauty industry has been growing at breathtaking speed—doubling since 1998 into a $7.9 billion market that is expected to climb to $9.6 billion by 2009, according to market research firm Access Asia. Some 90 million urban women in China spend 10% or more of their income on face cream, lipstick, mascara, and the like, particularly in fashionable Shanghai, where women spend 50 times more per capita on cosmetics than women nationwide.

At its face this looks like wonderful news, since cosmetics use would probably be an accurate measuring stick of the inroads Christian missionaries are making into China. But when you consider that China routinely persecutes its Christians, it begs the question: Who will teach the heathen Chinee how to curl their eyelashes -- us, or Chairman Mao's Ministress of Beauty? Fuck Iran and their nuclear reactors -- what Americans should be concerning themselves with is whether Red China plans to use its emerging glamour-related technologies to modernize and join the rest of the world, or whether its intentions are more sinister. Developing, as they say on the internets...