Shanghai - "Are you positive or negative about the effects of China on the world?" I tried to look no too cynical when the leader of a European delegation formulated last week the questions he wanted me to answer. Shanghai and China are flooded by delegations full of curious business people, government officials, NGO's, eager to find out how China is going to change the world. Most of them seem genuinly lost when it comes to the more fundamental questions.
All to often those relative newcomers try to fit China's development in some easy to catch cliches, since making a real assessment of what is going on is darned difficult. I try not to let them get away with all too easy ways of framing the China story. My task is to confuse you, I tell them, rattle their all to simple assumptions about the dangers and opportunities in China, try to liberate them from the all to simple ideas they might have had about China.
By the time I meet them, most visiting delegates have already made one simple but rather essential observation. "This is a huge country." While everybody might know the figures, only when you are traveling here, face the huge distances, the internal differences, people start to realize that even Shanghai - with mostly a bigger population than the region they come from - cannot be described in cliches only.
It is a delicate balance: trying not to deny the huge problems China is facing, while at the same time also avoiding all too easy doomsday scenario's that sell very well in the media. China's voracious hunger for energy and raw materials. The water crisis in Wuxi, the dead fish in China's lakes, the growing number of stories about social unrest: it's sizzling economic growth does seem to come at a price that might be too high.
China as a country has been used to an almost permanent state of crisis management and has become pretty good in managing crises of all kinds of nature. That is not meant as a compliment, but might help to understand why despite an endless row of serious incidents, there might be a way to continue economic progress without turning the environment or global economic relations into a real disaster mode.
What strikes me in China is the high level of inefficiency in using energy, labor, raw materials, almost anything that is needed for fuel its economic growth. Getting more coal and oil in has been the most important strategy to deal with the growing need for energy. But there could be another way. The level of inefficiency is so high that even a marginally successful program to save energy could make a huge difference and allow years of economic growth without the need for more coal or oil.
I'm not familiar with the current figures, but a few years ago China needed eight times as much energy to generate one US dollar worth of products compared to the United States, for sure also not a country that has a clean record when it comes to energy saving.
Efficiency is going to be a key word in the years to come. That might go against the slight anarchistic nature of China and its citizens, but when there is no other way out, China's crisis manager will find that way.
1 comment:
I'm positive about the effects of China on the world. If it was not for the affordable cost of "decent" household goods manufactured in China, millions of Americans would not be able to pay their mortgage, raise their kids, etc., due to the expensive cost of gasoline and heatlhcare.
Imagine a family income of 50,000 a year, having to pay for a mortgage, raise two kids, buy insurance for the home and car (not healthcare insurance), utilities, gasoline, healthcare insurance, and at the same time pay 20% - 30% more for everything in Walmart.
If the US Government decides to raise the tarriff or revalue the Chinese currency - do they also plan to lower the cost of gas or health insurance - I doubt it!
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