The archival value of the internet was redeemed when a search led me to the precise video clip of a segment from the old comedy improv television show, Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Steven Colbert, of all people, was the straight man in an event called "Party Quirks," described by host Drew Carey as a guessing-game in which Colbert's three colleagues would act out whatever unlikely person or thing had been printed on a slip in a sealed envelope. The first two comedians were funny; the third, Ryan Stiles, was uproarious. Remaining unknown to Colbert, the directive was flashed on the screen for the pleasure of the audience, remaining there as Stiles stiffened into a driver's posture and crept forward: FOOTAGE OF CRASH TEST DUMMIES. The vacant expression, the whiplash in Stiles' careful imitation of slow-motion; it was great comic pantomime.
From the same site providing this popular bit — YouTube — I found a lot of authentic crash test footage. My reactions were typical. First, solemnity in realization of what the test is meant to recreate. Next, awe at progressive engineering. Then, finally, the muse that visitors from a faraway world might be puzzled by the apparent obliteration of motorists in effigy — sent at a canonical 35 mph toward pylons designed to bury themselves between the automatons' legs, or locked to a targeted site and broadsided by rolling pile-drivers, all captured by high-speed camera in a thoroughgoing appeal to malice.
Of course, this would require an observer totally alien to the simple context in which these rituals are performed: consumer safety, held in high regard by the public and codified by the state. An automobile compromised by unintended use becomes a combination of lacerative and blunt instruments. Customers don't want to be killed or injured in an accident, carmakers want customers instead of victims and litigants, insurers want to keep their shirts. Crash tests stretch nearly all the way back to cars' prevalence on the road, and today General Motors provides a line of simulacra — the Hybrid III — deployed by rightfully interested agencies.
After viewing a few tests of American or European cars, I considered that the tradition in oversight was a cultural exponent — that maybe one could get a glimpse of a society through its crash tests. China, with its growing indictments for negligence in manufacturing, swiftly came to mind. They do run them over there, don't they? I ran another search.
I had no idea that the Chinese crash test entry is the auto world's lurid running joke. Since June the punchline has been a prospective import sedan called the Brilliance BS6, whose visit with a stationary obstacle owned by Germany's Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club is on film. Impact at about 30 mph caused the Brilliance to telescope, its front end snapping left and back, the driver's door torquing upwards to lock with the forward-buckling rear of the car as the dummy chauffeur was clotheslined by the steering column and dash. A remedial test three months later, in Spain, saw a little less carnage. In the image of the first wreck is the bid of the Chinese Communist Party for status as a superpower: made to look like what they have in the West, cheaply and in vain.
The World Bank revised one its assessments of China's GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity — down, and by two-fifths. Three times as many citizens as thought before live on exiguous wages, the Bank's threshold for "poverty." Back in November, Albert Keidel wrote in the Financial Times that a halving came because "China had never participated in the careful price surveys needed to convert accurately its gross domestic product into PPP dollars." However many ways economic standing can be interpreted, here is no challenger, no dynamo. Some conspicuously positive responses are drawn from this, one the inference that Beijing hasn't the military capacity or potential suspected, another that the embarrassment is a chance for neighborly help with market management.
How one responds in turn depends on what he has thought of China making headlines these last years. Walter Russell Mead, writing in the Los Angeles Times on the subject: "Don't pop the champagne corks." Who is about to do that? Not a classical liberal. There shouldn't have been revulsion at China's apparent economic successes, produced a couple of decades after chief Deng Xiaoping intercalated free market structures; nor celebration at the disclosure that Chinese capitalism is really a frontispiece on the same, incompetent totalitarian state. What bothered before was the relegation, in claims of China's approaching preeminence, of liberty to auxiliary importance. Personal and property rights don't merely supplement individual prosperity, they lay its foundation — and here, for nearly a decade, we heard of China's other way.
A poorer, slower, shoddier, less stable China benefits no one. But the fantasy of illiberal wealth-creation has again been dispelled. Policymakers — trading partners, the world's financial institutions, the Politburo, though necessarily not the Chinese people themselves — are granted another chance to act and govern otherwise. The Olympics are hoped in Beijing to be vindication, and granting normalcy to the country ruled by the Party will be foolish.