Book 3: My Visit to Kino.
This is the first book chronicling a new voyage by Cmdr. Gulliver and his friends. Kino is a former province of China that has been given great financial support by China and Saudi Arabia to develop pollution free energy and clean water technology. It is the world's most modern area. Among its accomplishments is a comprehensive method of licensing parents to guarantee the children a good life.
Excerpt:
It took less than ten hours from Los Angeles International Airport to touch down in Jingjing, the capitol of Kino. From what I had remembered as a boy, Kino was a province of China but in the late 90s it had been granted a freedom to experiment with social and political policies and with technology. Its progress has been even more spectacular than that of China, which is so big that changing fast is very difficult. When Kino fails in an experiment it doesn’t affect a billion people, as it did in China under the communist dictators. Kino can move forward more quickly and find solutions to problems that work in a modern and globalized world.
Kino, as a new country, didn’t have to endure the problems that plagued China during the 1900s. There were 40 years of war then 40 years of backward moving communism. But China is now making the progress that is rapidly bringing it to the leadership position of the world. Marco Polo would be proud. It practically owns the United States. The U.S. has bought trillions of dollars worth of Chinese goods and sold only a quarter of that amount to China. So China has been lending so much to the U.S. to keep it afloat that it practically owns New York and California!
China, of course, was a vast agricultural land with a rich cultural heritage, but a population crisis out of control. It had more than a billion people when I left Earth but it halved its yearly population increase. Here in Kino the ‘one child’ policy has been continued and modified. Kino now requires licenses to become parents.
In China the fertility rate has dropped to 1.3 per woman—less that the 2.1 required to replenish the parents and keep its population stable. Kino’s fertility rate is only 1.2. The millions of Chinese peasants of a few decades ago have been reduced as they have been absorbed by death or the cities. The uneducated masses have evolved into a highly educated citizenry which is astute in the ways of business and statesmanship. All this in a brief moment of history. It’s like a cosmic Siegfried and Roy changing a paper tiger into herd of lions at the snap of a finger. As effective as China has been, Kino is far ahead in its progress toward utopia.
Kino has had the opportunity to experiment in a modern “society based” society. That is, the rights of the society as a whole, rather than the rights of the individual citizens, are generally primary. They have also eliminated religion as a political force. A strong central government is in place. It requires the education of the citizens as to why improving the society will have more benefits for the average person than trying to pamper every individual’s desires, which are so often called ‘rights.’ It makes me wonder if these individual ‘rights’, that are generally based on individual selfishness rather than the social good, are at least in part responsible for the over two million prison inmates in my country. The big question is where is the best balance between the desires of individuals and the overall good of one’s society?