China is becoming a car-obsessed nation. Cars are a symbol of freedom, individuality, and wealth. Like the United States of the fifties, China is building infrastructure to accommodate a new way of life for a future China. Highways and new suburban towns are expanding outside the big cities, and the diminishing peasant class will soon be overtaken by a car-owning middle-class and the new money of a booming economy.

Recently, China has achieved the mark of a prosperous leisure class with the first McDonald’s drive-thru. McDonalds is said to be working on a deal with Sinopec, China’s largest gas retailer, to have the fast-food drive-thrus at Sinopec stations, which are dotted across the new frontier.

While China is still predominantly a sedentary society where meals are prepared and eaten at home, McDonald’s is confident this will change as Chinese living standards rise, a middle-class expands, and there is more disposable income to buy cars. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Last year, more than three million new cars hit Chinese streets, and auto sales were up 54% in the first quarter of this year. McDonald’s wants to follow China’s new car-driving middle class to their new suburban homes. “We need to be where the consumer is going to be,” says Mr. Schwartz [Chief Executive of McDonald’s China].

In France, McDonald’s is booming business even while French politics and society has been historically anti-American. There are now 1, 035 McDonalds in France. It is the third largest market behind Great Britain and Germany. The New York Times reports:

In some ways, McDonald’s reflects the contradictions of French society. France has opened to the world, and its companies have long adapted to global rules for selling their products. Yet for many French patrons, McDonald’s remains that little piece of America. “We are an icon of the United States, and, also, when you enter a McDonald’s restaurant, you enter America, “ he said [Mr. Hennequin, president of McDonald’s Europe].

“It’s one of the French paradoxes,” he went on. “The French like to be a little disruptive, provocative. Yet at the same time they vote with their feet. We serve one million customers every year.”

Later on:

Also crucial, he says, was a “French fascination with America.”

“It’s love and hate,” he said. “And there are so many Americas. The America of George Bush and that of Bill Clinton. New York is not San Francisco.”

It’s interesting to see the juxtaposition of two anti-American countries that love and hate America simultaneously. It is a conundrum for many countries that are jealous of American wealth, power, and military might, but also rely on America to lead the world in the 21st century. Whether anti-American countries like it or not, America is the only superpower in the world, and the only country that can lead the world.

China is at a stage in their democratizing government where America will have to pull them through a inevitable energy crisis because they are building their infrastructure around oil and coal, which will be sputtering towards obsolescence in the next 100 years. China has still yet to prove that they can handle the growing pains of a government and society in ideological, governmental, and societal change and come through a full-fledged democracy.

France is an “old” democracy in the midst of an identity crisis. France has been accused of losing its political relevance in a new world, where their weak political and military history is rearing its wimpy head again. Can France truly reinvent itself or will it succumb to the borderless homogenization of the European Union, where important self-sustaining national identity and purpose will be lost?

China is progressing while France is regressing. It will be interesting to see how democracy fares in these countries in the coming years. One thing is for sure, though, America will be leading the way like a loving parent, as its unappreciative children threaten to run away, yet are home just in time for dinner, McDonald’s dinner. Yipee!

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