"China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world."
--- Napoleon Bonaparte
I still remember in the eighties, when the Japanese took over the auto and electronic industries. There was a sense of doom in the United States. Angry people smashed Japanese cars on TV, though the TV sets they watched were also made in Japan. If the auto industry, the iconic symbol of American post war industrial prowess, was taken by the Japanese, what else can't they take from us?
With the benefit of hindsight, it turned out the Japanese threat was much less menacing. This also spoke to the dominance of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant civilization. There has been three revolutions that had or will have a huge impact on recent human history, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Revolution. The WASP civilization gave birth to all three of these, along with other events such as the explosion of modern music. Everything that we do today, from double ledger accounting to space exploration, owed its origin at least partly to the WASP civilization. After losing the auto and electronic industries to Japan, the Americans simply invented new ones. Computers, internet, Artificial Intelligence, Genetic research, the list goes on. The Japanese, with their more rigid culture, simply were not a strong participant in any of these new ones. At the same time, they have lost virtually all of their electronic industry and part of their auto to the Koreans and Chinese. The Europeans, in the mean time, have gone on a steady relative decline compared to the United States after bouncing back from the devastation of World War II. Such is the power of this single tribe from a once insignificant part of the world, its contribution to humanity in recent history completely dwarfed the contribution from all other tribes combined. While some groups such as Europe and East Asia played catch up, they were not able to follow the lead of of the WASP tribe into new industries. They were the more fortunate ones. Vast majority of the world is still not able to catch up to the Industrial Revolution, still stuck in the dark ages.
Like other East Asian countries, the Chinese are playing catch up to the West. While the jury is still out that they will be able to catch up to the most prodigious tribe in the world, what they achieved thus far is nothing short of astonishing. We all are familiar with the story about the decades long double digit growth which lifted the largest number of humanity out of poverty, but that was just the beginning of the story. The classic economic theories says that after countries climb up the economic ladder, they do more and more sophisticated thing, not before. The Chinese, apparently, did not get the memo. In fact, while they struggle in some traditional technologies like making jet engines, they are quickly moving to the top tier of countries in all areas of emerging technology. In most cases, they are pulling away from the pack and sprinting towards the leading country, the United States. When the "rest of the pack" consists of Western Europe and Japan, this is no mean feat. The Japanese were not able to achieve this even after they became fully industrialized.
To put some perspective on things, when Deng Xiaoping visited the United States in 1979, China was so poor that a country with the population of over 900 million did not have enough U.S. currency to pay for the trip. Jimmy Carter, who was president at the time, had to ask some rich billionaire to help sponsor Deng's visit. Fast forward 48 years, how things have changed. We need only to look at one industry, the e-commerce industry, to see the speed in which they move. The e-commerce industry was founded by the United States. By the time the Chinese started building their version of the e-commerce industry, there were already a formidable line up of companies such as Yahoo and Amazon in the United States. Starting with nothing, the Chinese now are the only other country with a e-commerce industry that is comparable in size and scope as the United States. This also helps them lay the foundation for one of the emerging technologies, Artificial Intelligence.
What they have achieved in building up their military industrial complex is also quite miraculous. As late as the nineties, the Chinese military consists of hand me down 1950 era Soviet ware, which they were barely able to license produce. It was said at the time that the Russians can fly their fighter bombers, unescorted, all the way to Beijing, bomb it and return and the Chinese would not be able to do much about it. Today, their Type-52D and Type 55 destroyers rival the best the world has to offer, such as the U.S. Arleigh Burke class destroyers. They are able to build and field multiple aircraft carriers. China is the only other country besides the United States to field a homegrown fifth generation aircraft, the J-20. They have a whole family of missiles that will take out aircraft carrier strike groups. No other country, not even the United States, have this capability.
In the next few posts, I will be exploring the rise of China.
No comments:
Post a Comment