hello maurice, you of little faith and less knowledge, no imagination and less hope, iow, the clueless, hereunder is an e-mail sent by fund manager from the Empire newly exploring in situ horizons and reflecting on the possibilities, and i quote:
Jay,
Thanks so very much for spending time with Jon and I to discuss your company, and your thoughts about China in the future. My post Hong Kong visit to China was most educational: I was amazed at how fast the country is changing; it reminded me about how much more I have to learn; and convinced me, as you suggested, to recommend that my kid’s learn mandarin. Many of the Chinese citizens that we chatted with seem to be confident that this is China ’s century whereas the last century was America ’s and Britain ’s before that. While they may be correct, I did observe two factors that may be our children’s only hope. First, the rapid growth of Starbuck’s and McDonald’s in China . While China is a skinning nation by western standards, I did notice an emerging belly line on more Chinese citizens than I expected. Maybe the average citizen in China in ten or fifteen years will be just like us—fat and happy -- thus giving the remaining skinny kid’s a chance to compete. A second intangible that may alter China ’s destiny in the 21st Century is ironically the one child policy. While this policy should be very successful in population control, the unintended consequence of this policy is potentially a lot of spoiled kid’s. As one local explained to me you have two sets of grand parent plus the parents, in total six people, all bestowing there undivided attention on one child. The net result, according to my source: a bunch of little emperor’s running around who may not have the work ethic of their parents. Anyways my travels were productive, and as you can tell, I kept my sense of humor. All the best and thanks for you time.
Regards,
and here was my considered but top-of-head response, and i again quote
Hello Tom, We are just back from worldmarket.blogspot.com Golden Week holiday.
Thank you for the note on your China trip reflections.
To add additional confusion to a continental society of long history, I make these points from personal suspicion, hope, and prayer and should I be wrong either on the up or down side, bad news for the RoW, up or down:
(i) China is big, more self-contained than not, but establishing a whole lot of links to the rest of the world (RoW) at rapid pace, and internally transforming fast, reverting to a period of its history of quite a while ago en.wikipedia.org and picking up from activities long abandoned en.wikipedia.org
(ii) Chinese civilization is fundamentally peaceful, as far as external neighbors are concerned, and basically stable, as far as the internal peasantry are figured, but, gad, when the pot boils over, things happen, either good or bad
(iii) Whereas James T Kirk of the Starship Enterprise is a fictional character of western fairy tales, Admiral Zheng He was a real character www7.nationalgeographic.com , and to me, there is a universe of difference between the culture that was China and the pop culture that is all over - the world's fate hangs in the balance
(iv) Up to this point, China has been the most rapidly and positively transforming nation for a quarter century, but China has only been catching up, first off of its cheap manual labour, and then paper capital. The hope is that China will continue for another quarter century, but breaking new horizons, and off of its cheap intellectual capital. The leverage off of intellect is starting to happen as I know just from stuff bandied about and schemed over. This is a most exciting development. I wish them well.
(v) China has huge challenges, but they are not necessarily the ones emphasized in the media, and many has solutions that are merely challenging but require no particular path breaking:
- Pollution - an environmental business is developing
- Energy - China is breaking ground in Nuclear en.wikipedia.org / wired.com / and Solar google.com
- Water - China has water, in the wrong places and used inefficiently, and they acknowledge the problem and is working out the solutions, including conservation, aqueduct building, centrifugal well tech, etc etc
- Food - China is actually a leader in genetic/bioscience
- Wealth – Will China get old before it gets wealthy? Comment , China ’s rapidly materializing middle class will soon equal entire national population of most nations, and wealth is a relative term.
In other words, many of the problems people pay attention to are merely opportunities, and should enough leadership, brains and money be put in place on the issues, the solutions are pretty straightforward. In the case of China , acknowledging the problems are done, leadership has been astute, experimentation rampant, and the mental energy of a whole continental sized economy backed by 6 millenniums of continuous and turbulent history is at once liberated and focused.
Now, with regard to the issue of One Child Policy and the phenomena of Little Emperors, I make the following necessarily bullet-pointy observations:
- Chinese innate/oral education and child rearing know-how ranks topmost in the world, especially when aligned with traditional family values and Confucian guidance
- Chinese parents are for the most part preparing ferociously their One Kid to explicitly compete, not just in China, but with the world – this can be seen by transformation/development of school systems, the curricula, the way students spend their spare time and holiday time, the amount of GDP allocated to education, the way the families support the kids, etc etc etc
- As I noted to you, from what I had seen on my occasional general knowledge tours, I am very concerned about what my Coconut’s future in which she absolutely must compete against the kids across the HK/mainland border, and my wife works as an at-home executive recruiter specializing in recruiting PRC returnees from top schools, whereas my brother-in-law interviews for Harvard undergraduate of the highschoolers – ouch, as in I am so glad I already got my diplomas
- In other words, it is an absolute jungle out there, everywhere, and the beasts that the jungle is incubating are simply ferocious
- Some beastlies are just beastly, but the majority are reared in a traditional Confucian schema – I have full faith in the schema when coupled and adapted to modern geewhizbangohwhoawee Internet-enabled convolution – the Chinese are simply good parents, full stop.
There is a problem that does give me pause, and we will simply have to watch and brief on it as we go, for it is not going to go away, and will hit us head-on, and it is the issue of gender imbalance – what will 70 million single guys without spouse do? That is the true worry.
Chugs, J |
