Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [47]
The laborers who survived created their own Chinatown which, during the Prohibition era, had an underground tunnel setup that led to the whorehouses and opium dens and, for the bootleggers, across to Calexico on the American side. Later on, Mexicali served as Mexican headquarters for the nationalist Chinese party of Sun Yat-Sen. Today, in Mexicali’s Chinatown, you hear people talking a blend of Spanish and Cantonese and, like one of our guidebooks says, “Only in Mexicali will you find banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging side by side with Chinese paper lamps.”
Interestingly, the University of Minnesota has the largest population of Chinese students of any campus in the U.S. and, when I was governor, I met with a group of about twenty of them. They’d told me that 80 percent of their people are still involved in agriculture, but that China’s farmland is pretty much maxed out. I thought it would be great if U.S. farmers, in Minnesota and elsewhere, could sell their surpluses to China. Here we’ve got grain rotting away in silos, but the potential profit from doing this could be enormous and we’d be helping their people at the same time.
I became a big supporter of bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), something that was also one of President Clinton’s foremost concerns. They’d moved from a strictly command economy to one where market forces were playing an increasing part, and it was definitely time to break down the remaining trade barriers. In May 2000, Clinton invited me to the White House again as part of a gathering of dignitaries to discuss China and the WTO, for what he called “the most important national security vote that will be cast this year.” I was honored to be sitting in the front row, not far from former presidents Carter and Ford. Clinton called his plan “an American vote. You know, it unites Henry Kissinger”—the president paused a moment, glancing down at Kissinger—“and Jesse Ventura. And not at a wrestling match!” (I guess Bill still had a sense of humor about me, despite my suggestion a couple of months earlier about taking out that hill in the Middle East).
His administration encouraged me to take an active role, and I’m proud to have been a part of the effort that resulted in China being admitted to the WTO in December 2001. That’s how I ended up spending a week in China on a trade mission early the next year. First in Beijing for several days, and then Shanghai.
It was humbling for me to be in China. There was an entire dinner in my honor in the Great Hall of the People, right near where the students were run over by the tanks at Tiananmen Square. I sure never figured a day would come in my life when the most populous country in the world would have a dinner dedicated to me in their most important building! I remember the food came in six or seven different courses, and was just remarkable. I also remember multitudes of toasts. The Chinese seem to be very big on toasting.
Whenever I traveled, I was never caught in a traffic jam because all the streets were completely blocked off when I passed through. High-level foreign visitors are treated well. What impressed me most about China was its cleanliness, and how orderly the people are. They seem have a natural humility, going about their business and sticking to themselves.
But China is definitely absorbing Western culture. I went there expecting to see everyone running around looking like Mao Tsetung. Well, at times you will see the traditional Chinese, if you get out to rural areas, but in the cities I saw more golf shirts and jeans than you could imagine. Not only do they dress like us, but they’re building freeways now with the identical green signs that we have. Underneath the Chinese language, there are smaller letters written in English.
I was amazed at how they can be—it’s almost an oxymoron—so rich and so poor at the same time. I found out from my agriculture commissioner, Gene Hugeson, that the average