China's Megatrends
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China's Megatrends

John Naisbitt, Doris Naisbitt

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eBook - ePub

China's Megatrends

John Naisbitt, Doris Naisbitt

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About This Book

"[John Naisbitt's] vision of the world's economy has the mark of genius." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

Internationally-renowned futurist and bestselling author John Naisbitt is back with China's Megatrends, the most comprehensive look at the present and future of China and the transformation that is reshaping its economic, political, and social systems. Since publishing the enormously popular Megatrends —a New York Times bestseller for two years that has been published in 57 countries—John Naisbitt has become the most respected and well-known prognosticator of global trends. To write China's Megatrends, Naisbitt and wife Doris were granted unprecedented access by the Chinese government to all aspects of the country and its social model. Using the same techniques of information gathering and analysis as Megatrends, the Naisbitts present a prescient and unique perspective on the emergent global power and its role in the future of globalization.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9780061963445
Subtopic
Forecasting

Pillar 1

Emancipation of the Mind


The dimension of Deng Xiaoping’s call for emancipating the minds of the people can be captured only in the context of the time: almost 1 billion people divided in a class struggle had to be united in the common goal of transforming the country. The destructive forces of the Cultural Revolution had to be turned into constructive energy for building a new China. The transformation had to start with allowing people to reclaim their own thinking. The liberation of minds from indoctrination to emancipation was the first and most important pillar of the transformation of China.

“Cast off the shackles that bind our spirit.”
China in May 1978: A tiny giant of a man, Deng Xiaoping, makes the first, indispensable step in China’s journey to modernity and a market economy as he calls upon his people: “We need to bring about a great emancipation in our way of thinking.”
Deng understood that a top-down centralized society with little space for personal contribution was not fertile ground for a market economy. The emancipation of minds was necessary for a successful economic reform characterized by decentralization. At the time, China looked much like an old-fashioned company that had been run by a dictatorial president, definite about his own ideas, deaf to criticism, and adamant against any change. China’s people were like incapacitated employees gagged for decades who would have to learn to think independently. Decentralization and emancipation had to go hand in hand.
In the years between 1949 and 1976, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had melded the most populous nation on earth into a huge gray mass: hungry, isolated, and indoctrinated, with any work carried on outside the state structure illegal. Education and knowledge were condemned, universities were closed, and national college entrance examinations were suspended. This was Mao’s version of a “race to the bottom.”
How did people make it through those years? Many books have been written about how deep the wounds from these days are and how much they are still hurting. But in many of our conversations it was surprising to us how little bitterness there is. This might well be part of the Chinese people’s ability to adapt to circumstances that cannot be changed, and of their much more forward-looking attitude toward life. They feel it is more useful to put energy into their future well-being than to dwell in the past. Many of our successful Chinese acquaintances were sent to rural parts of China for “reeducation” during the Cultural Revolution; and although moving people like chess pieces, and taking them away from their family life, jobs, schools, and universities, seems quite dismaying to us, most of them found something good in it.
A Good Idea at the Time
“That’s just how it was,” said our friend Wang Wei, one of China’s very successful businessmen. In 1976, Wang—the tall, handsome older son of an average Chinese urban family—was seventeen years old and full of energy. Like 12 million other students, he was sent to the countryside between 1966 and 1976; he was told to leave school to work in a small village in the mountains of Liaoning province, in northeastern China. It was not exactly what he had been dreaming of, but he made the best of it, he worked hard, and it paid off. A talent for organizing and leadership qualities were needed even under those circumstances. Wang Wei was soon promoted, and after working in the fields and raising sheep he became the leader of a production team of almost 1,000 farmers.
In this countrywide reeducation program President Jiang Zemin worked as an assembly line worker at an automobile plant in Shanghai. Chen Kaige, China’s famous filmmaker, was sent to work in a rubber plantation in Yunnan, just one year after he had entered high school in Beijing. The vice president of Nanjing University was removed from his job as head of the sociology department to work in construction as a hod carrier—a terrible job (as John knows from his own experience in Utah). Asked how he felt about carrying bricks and mortar up ladders to bricklayers, the vice president said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
In 1978 the concept of a good idea changed.
To turn around the moribund enterprise, China, Deng had to promote emancipation instead of indoctrination. At the beginning of this process, eighteen bold farmers—who, in desperation, had overcome their own indoctrinated thinking—initiated the first big step in reforms. We tell their story in the chapter on Pillar 2. Deng Xiaoping’s reinventing process needed initiatives from the ground to improve productivity. That’s why he supported the proposal of the farmers for a change in agriculture. Very soon the spirit of emancipation could be found in many areas. Gradual but widespread educational reforms were started. Science, art, and society itself started to experiment with increased individual freedom. Artists were no longer driven by remittance work, stuck in traditional calligraphy or propaganda art. It was the dawn of new values and a new detachment from the masses. Just as in the Renaissance, Chinese artists started to focus on their own work and ideas and painted what was important to them and important for China in their eyes. They were more than willing to march at the front of the emancipation parade.
But it was not only artists who moved to the front of the parade. People from all walks of life came forward, including simple people from the countryside.
Freedom Has Many Faces
“Freedom for Chinese is not directly connected with the circumstances they live in,” Wang Yukun, director of the Center for Chinese Enterprise Thinking, Tsinghua University, and a former Fulbright scholar, explained to us. “When I grew up in Shandong, times for our family were not good at all. But my mother, born in 1920, worked harder than a man and carried the full responsibility to feed her six children because our father barely made enough money to keep him alone alive, but never lost her freedom of spirit. She was illiterate, but she held on to her goal to enable a good education for her children. She fought for this wish throughout the years of poverty and deprivation; she broke with the tradition of the oldest son working on the farm instead of continuing school; she insisted on higher education for my elder sister, against the common thinking that any investment in a daughter would be of benefit for the future husband’s family. All of my mother’s decisions were made in peace of mind, the certainty that no one and no system could get hold of the freedom in her spirit. ‘Only outside the field,’ she kept telling us, ‘will you be able to see the mud on your feet.’
“We all made it out of the mud,” Yukun said, “and so did China.”
Deng Xiaoping encouraged the whole nation “to step out of the field to see the mud on their feet.”
Deng’s call for emancipating minds was a call for looking at the Chinese reality without ideologically colored glasses. Calling for the emancipation of minds and, in the official language, “seeking the truth from facts” marked the dawn of a new era for China’s people. Also, this call entailed an impressive balancing act for China’s political leaders. To trust the people and let loose the rigid grip of doctrinarism released huge energy. The energy of 1 billion people could, like atomic power, work for the construction or the destruction of a new China. Without a certain degree of confidence and peace of mind about what he was doing, Deng would not have had that initial thrust, and what followed would not and could not have happened. In 1978, 165,000 young Chinese graduated from a university; in 2007 the number of graduates had risen to 4.5 million.
Very early on, in 1977, when Deng as education minister reopened the door to higher education, Wang Wei, Wang Yukun, Chen Kaige, and thousands of others seized the opportunity to make the most of their talents. A thirst for knowledge swept through China and narrowed social and cultural gaps nationwide. When colleges and universities resumed their regular teaching programs, when engineers and technicians were reassigned to their former duties, and especially when Deng Xiaoping called science and technology the “number one kind of productivity,” the demand for a wide diversity of publications soared. The idea that “everybody has an equal right to higher education” soon aroused China’s hunger for information and knowledge. From a baseline of several hundred periodicals in 1978, the number increased to almost 10,000 by 2007. Before the “opening up” only about 1,000 book titles were published annually. Today more than 250,000 titles are published each year. China now produces the most publications in the world per year: more than 3 billion copies of magazines and 6 billion copies of books annually, according to official figures.
A few years ago, as we strolled through the largest bookstore in Shanghai (seven floors, each the size of a football field) we were blown away by the endless rows of books and magazines. Not only were Chinese of all ages looking and buying; many were sitting on the stairs or on the floor, copying pages out of books they probably couldn’t afford to buy.
Pulling Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps
People who report about China come from different societies and have different backgrounds. Most journalists report on China with reference to their own country: how China differs; how far China is advanced or how far behind it is. This creates various angles for stories. The speech President Hu Jintao gave at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 2007 was a very good summery of China’s position, goals, and problems. The call for further emancipation of the mind and the continuing of reforms and opening up in economic, cultural, and political life was at the center of the speech. Anyone can download it from the Internet. But just as Barack Obama’s speeches are interpreted differently by Democrats and Republicans, what stands behind Hu’s words leaves room for interpretation.
To get the best reading, the context of the past and the present are as important as the words themselves. We, like many others, keep reminding ourselves that ours is a western base and that our personal view is not necessarily in harmony with the Chinese view. Any fair appraisal needs to be made as much as possible within the Chinese context. Our western background very much determined our first judgment about the situation of a Chinese couple.
It was in the year 2000. We left our hotel in Shanghai and walked a few steps, around a corner. It was as if we were stepping into a different world. Not more than about fifty yards away from the five-star Ritz-Carlton was a little store. “Store” is actually too grand a word. It was a little kiosk, with an addition in the back that had some blue-red-and-white striped material stretched over a metal rack to make a kind of tent. We learned later that this addition, approximately four square yards, was the home of the couple who in the front part sold snacks and drinks to migrant construction workers working in the buildings that were being erected on practically every street. What to western eyes would seem unbearable living conditions was already progress for the couple. They had left their work on a farm and felt that they now had a much better life. We continued to visit that little kiosk, speaking with the couple through Michelle Wan, a good friend from the Ritz-Carlton who became our interpreter and reporter when we wanted to know how the two shop keepers were doing.
You will not find them there today. They slowly made their way up, first with the kiosk near the hotel, which already allowed a better education for their “left behind” child; then they opened another little kiosk; and a little later they hired someone to help them. They no longer slept in the tent behind their goods; they now had a modest apartment. And then one day they were gone; they had opened a “real store” in a different neighborhood.
Detatching and Letting Go
Thirty years earlier such an initiative would have been unthinkable. “Emancipating minds” was the starting point, opening the door for people to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Nevertheless the Chinese self-concept still differs from that of westerners. The Chinese see themselves more as part of a network than as individuals, and they welcome a strong, cautious leadership that ensures a good performance for all. To run China as an enterprise fits that concept very well. Chinese gain power and self-confidence in the family, in a group, in the network in which they are integrated.
Our friend Zhang Haihua explained to us that much of Chinese thinking has its roots in Chinese agricultural history. For thousands of years, Chinese lived in villages near their fields, and the survival and well-being of individuals depended on how much they supported both the village and the fields. Reinforced by Confucius, the concept was extended to loyalty to the country and the government, and it included respect for and obedience to teachers and superiors.
The first reforms took place in agriculture, where today 40 percent of the Chinese still work, and this will probably be the last area where emancipating minds will be complete.
Emancipation Takes Time
China started its modernization from a point where the West was more than 100 years ago. But the West tends to measure China’s economic and political progress against the values and standards developed over a century or more. Chinese look at China from the background of their own history. People experience a great deal of joy and optimism about their current and future living conditions. Westerners would consider the current conditions backward, but this is only because we are looking at them through American or European eyes.
Emancipation takes time. If you think of modern democracy, the West started the process more than 200 years ago. But in Switzerland it was not until in February 1971 that women were first fully allowed to vote. In America racial segregation continued well into the 1960s. India, the biggest “democracy,” still has a caste system that is profoundly undemocratic.
There are violations of human rights in China, and every violation against human rights should be condemned. But on the other hand, no nation has achieved more on certain basic human rights in such a short time. Article 3 of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration says that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. Under the government of the Communist Party of China, more than 400 million people came out of poverty, starvation, and a fight for survival. China has a literacy rate of 90.9 percent; life expectancy at birth is 73 years; and the per capita GDP is $5,962. India has a literacy rate of 61 percent, life expectancy of 69 years, and a per capita GDP of $2,762. (GDPs are on a price power parity basis. Source: IMF.)
The Revival of the Chinese Entrepreneurial Gene
Life, liberty, and security certainly imply creating a stable economic base. Deng’s call for emancipating minds was the spark that reawakened the Chinese entrepreneurial gene, which had been dormant for a long time. This liberation eased the great pressure during the comprehensive social transition, and it increasingly helped the Chinese to deal with change. It carried China through a proactive fight against poverty and backwardness. It set up a completely new framework for and attitude toward doing business on every scale, from very small to very large.
China’s transformation to a market economy required changes on all fronts. China was like a company in which everything was obsolete—from the buildings to the management, from bookkeeping to the workforce to equipment—and all operations were a disorganized mess.
In a well-run enterprise, employees are encouraged to develop entrepreneurial thinking, adding to the economic potential of the company. The emancipation of minds opened the eyes of the people to all kinds of business opportunities. Some of these opportunities were unusual, as our examples will show, and at the beginning many were only partly legal. But eventually they all contributed to the whole and served the common goal. As chaotic as the process sometimes was, it had the right mixture of control and freedom, and it led to an explosion of private businesses. By the year 2008 two-thirds of China’s economy was in the private sector.
A New Generation in Old Structures
By 1992 China was aware that it needed to accelerate progress in its science and technology sector, or further development would come to a halt. A strategy needed to be set in a national plan for the following year. Two diametrically opposed strategies were suggested to President Jiang Zemin, as related by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in his biography of Jiang, The Man Who Changed China.
One strategy was presented by Zhu Rongji, the vice president; the other was presented by Dr. Song Jian, who...

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