GREY Area
3 words for everything right and wrong with china
In many ways, China as a nation seems to have reached the end of a long winter of carbon-filled skies, choking industrialisation and a brazen disregard for all things unaccounted for in the quest for double-digit GDP. As the world watches, the first blossoms of a post-industrial, pro-green China have begun to bloom — a renewables market watered full of life-giving finances, a national carbon-trading scheme in the pipeline, government promotions based on environmental protection. And then comes the cold snap and an April snow that wipes the ground barren and throws the new world right back to stage one.
3 Words For Everything Right and Wrong With China
April 28, 2016
China makes it incredibly difficult to be an environmental optimist. Headlines sing the praises of increased investment in clean tech energy and a government willing to sign alongside other conscientious world leaders in Paris, but the nation’s capital is still pumping out 200+ PM2.5 readings and foreign companies are still clamouring at the gates to shift their heavy manufacturing from the EU to Chengdu.
It doesn’t matter how blue the sky above, the grey area dominating the horizon continues to choke the country with corruption, shifted responsibility and a disastrous lack of oversight.
The insidious Grey Area may as well be a proper noun for everything that stands to cripple China’s entry into a modern, globalised world. It stands for a nation in which the Rule of Law is applied on a “case by case” basis. It stands for an national leader committed — potentially honestly — to stamping out corruption, while his family members hoard billions in offshore accounts. It stands for the self-serving motivation of status-hungry civil servants, working for a nation that attributes the concept of “me, myself and I” to the capitalist machine of western democracy.
And yet, it is exactly this perpetual Grey Area that has given rise to some of the most innovative, pragmatic and dynamic entrepreneurs the world has ever seen. Though in much of the western world, an outdated opinion on “copycat China” still pervades, it is Chinese companies and individuals who now lead some of the world’s most potentially disruptive industries. It is Chinese minds that are creating, using and rapidly outgrowing the latest high-technology applications in daily life — from personal mobile technology to the internet of things. It is Chinese citizens that are evolving irrespective of global consumer trends and predictions, adopting and developing technology beyond the conception of the everyday Euro-American consumer.
The Chinese ability to continually read between the lines of black and white, has created an entire generation of spin-off companies founded in response to the latest industry trends. The ability to make vague, noncommittal speeches in which many words are used but no instruction given, has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to govern a nation that accounts for a full fifth of the world’s population.
The Chinese seem to have an innate ability to deal with the depths of the Grey Area in all its destructive, disruptive glory. For those of us born into a more rigid, inflexible and heavily structured society, it may be difficult to rid ourselves of our cultural caging and adapt to the unshakable dynamism of Chinese modernity.