As I noted in an earlier post a good friend recently turned me on to The Long Now Foundation which hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. Last week it offered free seminar in San Francisco by Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley titled, ”China Thinks Long-Term, But Can It Re-Learn To Act Long-Term?.” I was not able to attend, but my friend was. I am excited to listen to the actual pod cast once they post it (November 1 edit:  it has now been posted!). Below is the synopsis of his presentation that my friend emailed to me.

“China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness — China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army. No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term.These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.

ROBUST CHINA:

- Peaceful borders in all directions
- Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world, including with societies the US refuses to deal with
- 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty
- Private savings rate of 40 percent (it’s 1 percent in the US)
- 300 million people with cell phones, and the best cell phone service in the world
- A superb freeway system built almost overnight
- New building construction everywhere, and some of it is brilliant
- 150 million people online
- 350,000 engineering graduates a year
- One-third of the world’s direct investment
- Huge trade surplus
- And an economic growth rate of 9 to 12 percent a year! For decades.

but also…

BRITTLE CHINA:

- Not much arable land, so a growing dependence on imported food
- Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal, by dirty methods, growing at the rate of 1-2 new coal-fired plants per week
- 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted and rivers are polluted or pumped dry
- Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China; you don’t see the sun any more
- Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes
- Driven by environmental horrors and by widespread corruption, there were 87,000 instances of social unrest last year, going up every year
- The population is aging rapidly, with no pension or welfare, and a broken healthcare system
- The stock markets are grossly manipulated
- Public and official amnesia about historical legacies such as Tiananmen Square in 1989

How can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions don’t really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to focus on and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when there’s a break in that growth? It could come from inside China or from outside (such as a disruption in the US economy).

It’s hard to look at the China boom now without thinking about the Japan boom in the 1970s and ’80s, remembering how everyone knew the Japanese were going dominate the US and world economy, and we all had to study Japanese methods to learn how to compete. Then that went away, and it hasn’t come back.

The leadership of China is highly aware of the environmental problems and is enlightened and ambitious about green solutions, but that attitude does not yet extend beyond the leadership, and until it does, not much can happen.

That’s China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly unresolved.

–Stewart Brand

David Cross, one of the students who participated in last year’s China trip, sent me the following flash presentation found on the Goldman Sachs website (see upper right hand corner and then click on “The BRICs Dream: Web Tour.”  I thought it was well done.  Clearly, the folks at Goldman “get” the importance of the global economy.  FYI, “BRICs” stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China.  You will need Adobe, Flash or Player to watch the flash presentation.  It would be great if we could do a trip that visits all four countries, although to do so would likely be cost and time prohibitive!

I found this post on the China Law Blog re: the marketing of American consumer products in China to be interesting.  I did not know that firms such as UPS, the package delivery company, provide annual reports available to the public about the categories of products they deliver in a particular country.  The UPS survey asserts that Chinese urban consumers, or “Chuppies, have many shopping preferences depending on their age, gender and location, and they appear to have a heavy preference for a variety of quality American products.  The ”most sought after” categories of American goods by these “Chuppies” are: (1) home appliances; (2) consumer electronics; (3) health care products/pharmaceuticals; (4) beauty products; (5) apparel/fashion accessories; and (6) movies, music and books.  This data and information, while broad, would seem to be of interest and value to a variety of American firms seeking to penetrate the Chinese market. 

A good friend recently turned me on to The Long Now Foundation which hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. It is offering an upcoming (free!!) seminar by Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley titled, “China Thinks Long-Term, But Can It Re-Learn To Act Long-Term?” You may find this seminar of interest. Once it is loaded into a podcast, I will definitely watch it.

Global Business Network. You may find the following article posted there titled, “Four Futures for China Inc.,” of interest. It addresses the question of whether China’s economic and political power will continue to expand dramatically or will it slow in the decade ahead? GBN’s Jesse Goldhammer and Doug Randall respond in this Business 2.0 article with four possible interesting scenarios.