Progress

There are many things to complain about in China, among them the fact that complaining about them publicly can lead to your visa being canceled (if you’re lucky enough to be a foreigner from a respected country). One thing I really can’t stand is privileged foreigners, usually expats, indulging in rants against their home countries while pointing out how China is doing everything better, usually including an apologetic sentence in the beginning or end (Yes, human rights, BUT …). Along with it often comes an arrogant attitude of someone who believes he embarked on the right side of history and the stupid people in his stupid home country are just dumb to understand that THIS IS THE FUTURE!!!!

Having said that, even with a more moderate point of view one has to admit that there are developments in China that are underreported in our media and that we can learn from or should at least be aware of. It’s also true that our media has a bias, though I’m not sure if bias is the right word. It’s rather a different setting of priorities. While many people, including me, think that the economical and technical developments happening in China will have the biggest impact on our own future and thus are the most important things to report about, journalists working for big publications often see their mandate in revealing the downsides, problems and dangers of China’s authoritarian governance – which is important too. So in order to get a bigger picture I think the best thing to do is to read traditional newspapers but also some other publications, such as techcrunch for news concerning China’s thriving start up scene or the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong based newspaper that’s sometimes a bit too comforting, but has many in detail reports about issues that are below the radar of foreign publications.

There’s one thing in particular that annoys me about Europe (especially Germany) and that I love about China: Openness to technological progress. When you think of automation and robotics, what’s your first thought? If you mainly consume German newspapers, chances are you’re worried about consequences for the labor market and the replacement of humans by machines. The same for literally all other new technologies: Gene editing = Disrupting nature, jeopardizing our planet. Sharing economy = Killing traditional businesses, threatening steady, stable jobs. Digital payment methods = Surveillance, dangers through hacking, transparent citizen. It’s good to have a critical assessment of new technologies, but if that leads the people of a country to reject them from the outset, something’s gone wrong. Add to that the excruciatingly long and often failing processes to plan and implement new infrastructure due to excessive standards and citizens who think a few hectar protection area for some animal species are actually more important than modern roads and train tracks (recent example: 10 years to rebuild a bridge in Berlin – cities like Dubai or Beijing would be unrecognizable after the same amount of time) and you can’t help but feel like Germans sometimes just really want to harm themselves. The funny thing is that Germany has amazing fundamental research and innovation potential, but often fails to realize that because of a lack of entrepreneurial spirit and the public aversion to new things.

China is the other extreme. As long as they do not threaten party-rule, innovations are not only welcome but actively promoted by the state as a way to modernize the country and ultimately make it globally competitive. It took China three (3!) years to go from a quasi-monopole for cash to nearly cashless in major cities. In less than the time it took Germany to build 500km of tracks for the Berlin-Munich connection, China – not having had high speed railways before – built an entire new network only for bullet trains which currently has a length of 27000km. And it’s not just visible on the bigger scale, you can see the pace of progress in your everyday life here too. Shops close and open, a new bike-sharing service appears and vanishes, some trend sets in and all of a sudden everybody uses an app for something that had to be done manually before. The key to this fast-lived environment is not just a lower amount of regulations or the very competitive spirit of young entrepreneurs here, it’s also that Chinese seem to more welcoming to changes in their everyday lives. Offer a German a solution for a minor problem (say an app that allows you to quickly buy public transport tickets on your phone) and he will ask: “Do I really need this? What about data privacy?” Offer it to a Chinese and he will take it for the initial discounts offered and happily keep using it for the time saved and comfort added.

I know, we’re doing quite good in Germany, so why change a running system? I think it’s this kind of wary, phlegmatic attitude that’s dangerous in the long run. The world doesn’t stop evolving because you’re happy with the status quo and isolating yourself from this only leads to a bigger impact when reality catches up with you. While I’m really happy that we have a government that puts the individual citizens and their concerns first, I’d love to see some more curiosity and a positive vision of the opportunities the future holds.

Morals

This picture is taken from the evaluation of an online survey where people from all over the world could indicate their moral preferences for an altered version of the "trolley problem" with self-driving cars. All the questions assume you are in the car and encounter a situation in which a crash is inevitable, but depending on how the car is programmed, there are different outcomes, e.g. either an old person or a child, either a rich person or a poor person will be killed etc. One of the questions asked whether you'd prefer to die yourself or kill an (presumably innocent) pedestrian. The responses can be seen above and well, China does not come over as the most empathetic place...
The full article can be found here.

The running foreigners

After some exhausting, smart-ass history plus geopolitics comments, the time has come for letting you know about my recent triathlon effort. For your information: I used to be a sporting ace in high school, doing mountainbiking and running every other day. That was before Berlin and studying happened. Who could’ve known live had so many more interesting activities on offer, like going to bars or simply cramming your day so full of social activities that you didn’t even get home between 10am and midnight (another factor is that Berlin’s topography leaves mountainbiking without mountains, which is a pretty boring activity – also your bike will probably get stolen after a few months). So I kept running every now and then out of a sense of duty and despite my suboptimal lifestyle health-wise, my cardio remained on an acceptable level thanks to my age and the years of previous training.

That being said, things got even worse since I arrived in Beijing. As mentioned before, this is not a city where you want to move around by foot. After a while I managed to find a decent running track, but soon after winter arrived. Call me a pussy, but I do sports for fun, not because I think what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. And there are more fun things I can think of than running in -5°C climate, like staying at home. So besides swimming and playing some badminton, I’m lazy right now.

But when I got the offer to participate in a triathlon, fully paid for and with the prospect of even getting some extra money for finishing, I obviously couldn’t resist.

Little digression: White Monkey Job – Chinese love white people, at least in specific settings for specific occasions. Whenever something has to appear worldly, international or chic, you better have some white faces on it! Sometimes black or arab faces do too, but the relationship is there is more ambivalent, while as a white person, you nearly exclusively experience positive racism. White people are also great English teachers, no matter if they’re from the States, the Netherlands or Russia (but try getting an English teacher job with an Asian face, no matter where you were born). Because of these circumstances, there are numerous so-called “white monkey jobs”, some more, some less dignified. You can be a background actor, maybe a model or an attraction at a night-club. I even heard of some white people attending a wedding celebration as hostesses. I’m not keen on any of these activities, but I really appreciate that rural sports events these days like to invite and equip foreigners to look less rural. In this case, being cold-blooded capitalist pays off, because you’re going to the unlikeliest events, do things you usually wouldn’t and end up not paying for that or even earning some money.

Two weeks ago I attended the first and hopefully not last event of this kind, a triathlon in Jiangxi (江西) province near its capital Nanchang (南昌), about 1500km south of Beijing. The distances weren’t too hard, 13,3km running, 2km kayaking and 22km biking, but not having been in a competition for years, I was still very excited. Upon arrival at the train station (night trains truly are a blessing), I was picked up by the organizer himself and then taken onto a bus with a few curious volunteers that were helping at the event. After arriving in the tiny city of Jing’an (靖安县) I registered and then waited for hours until more foreigners arrived, among them Olya, veteran foreign participant at Chinese running competitions and organizer of “foreign delegations” to them. Many of the foreigners are regulars at those events and thus know each other, so the competitions also function as get-togethers for them. On this one, 14 of us participated, some of them pros running as a means to earn their living (through price money), others just like me – making use of the paid-for policy to have a good time. After checking into the (pretty nice) hotel and preparing bikes, equipment etc. for the run the next morning, we all went to bed quite early.

The competition took place the next day at 8am, so that the slowest participants would finish around noon. The running part came first, starting on a typical newly build (means huge) street and then diverting into a river valley. The race was officially cross-country, but actually all the biking and running took place on paved roads, it was only a bit hillier than normal competitions. I was very surprised to see that my pace wasn’t all that different from my best times some 5 years ago (about 1km/h slower – but given the terrain it would probably even be less under normal circumstances). I was even more surprised that I managed to finish the kayaking in an acceptable time and without falling into the water – it was my first time. During the last section, I constantly competed with and eventually lost to a really dogged Chinese lady, but was still fairly satisfied, because by teaming up during riding bikes we both improved our pace. The end result was 30^th out of 120 or so participants. Since my humble goal was not to bite the dust and finish somehow, I’m super happy about it.

Representing "international" in the events title

After finishing, I could feel like a superstar for once in my life. I really don’t envy them. Hundreds of Chinese, most of them in school age, were gathering at the city square where the race started and ended. They probably just came because there weren’t that many others things to do in Jing’an on a Sunday, but once they saw foreigners, they knew what to do. If you didn’t move for more than a minute, someone would certainly approach you with a smartphone asking for a picture. Once that happened, around 20 others (usually girls) who previously had been to shy to ask broke their silence and started queuing up for a picture. I tried to stay patient and friendly - after all, there are no evil intentions whatsoever - but after 2 hours of taking pictures, you really start to get tired of it. Even more annoying are the usually middle-aged Chinese women (sometimes men too) who just film you for minutes without asking for consent or even looking at you. If you happen to be black and have nappy hair you sometimes come across particularly brazen locals who just start to pet your hair like it was someone’s dog. That’s when you realize again that most of China is not Beijing or Shanghai (where this stuff doesn’t happen at all anymore), but places that barely see people from other countries. But for exactly that reason I’m really keen on participating at more of these events – you’re seeing a part of the country you otherwise definitely wouldn’t.

And a glimpse into the crystal glass

So where is all this leading us? God knows, I don’t, mostly because the development hinges on a few factors that are extremely hard to predict. So instead of assuming too much, I rather choose the humbler path of pointing at a few facts and possibilities that I feel are often overlooked.

1. Like size for example. This is the simplest one and actually quite obvious, but there’s no harm in repeating it over and over again: China hast 1.4 billion inhabitants – the US has 325 million, the EU 512 million. So comparing China to the US is a bit like comparing Germany to Austria. Given the sheer size of its population, China would naturally be the most powerful, dominant country on earth (the same goes for India). The fact that it’s not, that even now its per capita income is still less than a 5^th of the German one, shows how far China on the whole still is from the standard of life that we enjoy – despite its superb infrastructure and glistening megacities.

2. People base their predictions for the future on their experiences of the past. That’s a fair heuristic principle most of the time, but as you know from your own life, when things are too good to be true, some shit happens and brings you back down to earth. The period of growth for China won’t last forever. Its end is not bound to arise as an explosive financial crisis (though that’s possible too), it might as well come in the form of ever decreasing growth rates at a time where there’s still a big gap between China and fully developed countries. The same kind of awe that people are showcasing now was a common reaction to Japan’s meteoritic rise in the 1980s and early 90s, before it imploded and left a country with a nearly stagnant economy and huge demographic problems. This is not to say that the same is going to happen in China, but merely to show that predictions on the basis of previous developments are only right until coincidence proves them wrong.

3. This is actually a more specific example of my second point “things that don’t have to and hopefully won’t happen but with a chance of them happening so big that they should be taken into consideration”. I’m sure we all agree that war is an evil and starting a war is morally wrong, except maybe in a few very specific, very rare cases. Yet wars happen, despite their negative consequences and despite everybody knowing about these consequences from history. How come? A widely accepted theory of international relations purports that in the absence of a supreme authority countries behave like humans in the stone age, uncivilized, tribalistic and constantly fighting for survival. As a global power, the US is currently kind of a supreme authority that decides on the rules and how and when to apply them.

Now if you were in this position, would you happily give up or share your power with some other country that has very different opinions and views? Probably not, so you’re preparing for the worst. Since there’s no higher power that could intervene or mediate, suspicion between incumbent and challenger reigns. Nobody wants a hot war, but then again, in order to reach strategic goals, under certain conditions state leaders would be willing to risk it. And of course there’s the slippery slope. While a sudden raid on a country like it was common 100 years ago is highly unlikely these days, a tit-for-tat situation that boils over and develops into an actual armed conflict is a real possibility. In fact, it doesn’t even require a lot of fantasy, so here’s a little horror scenario:

Basic premises: China remains assertive and nationalist, the US retains its bipartisan support for containment and a hawkish foreign policy and Taiwan keeps voting green (its independence party) and increasingly identifies as a non-Chinese entity – the latter is also an already ongoing process, with young Taiwanese people overwhelmingly identifying as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

Driven by its own promises and pressure from a big nationalist share of its population, China becomes more and more aggressive in the South Chinese Sea and the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese realize that they can’t have both forever – economic advantages from ties with the Mainland and autonomy as a quasi-country. Polls show strong support for independence among the population (in case you don’t know: Taiwan is a full democracy) and activists demand a popular vote on the issue once for all. The US – well aware that a retreat here would be interpreted as a surrender to China in the Asia-Pacific region – guarantees its support for the democratic decision of the Taiwanese people. The vote for independence would then result in immediate military action by China. Even though it is said to be very pragmatic, there are a few core principles that would always cause China to take radical action, the most important being unity. Basically, the Chinese understand their history as a dialectic process between unity and chaos. When China is whole and united, it is strong and successful, when it is divided, it is weak and vulnerable. This is a core principle carved into the culture. It is not necessarily accurate, since “China’s” territory changed a lot during the dynasties and there is no such thing as a Han culture pervading millennia. But argue whatever you want, from a Chinese perspective giving up a single square meter of its alleged territory is the road to chaos and humiliation, which is why a Taiwanese attempt to independence would naturally lead to a Chinese attack, resulting in a war with the US.

This scenario also has the “advantage” that none of the countries acted as an aggressor, as viewed by their own people respectively. Taiwan merely established its independence formally, China merely prevented separatism and the US merely reacted to an attack on a free, sovereign nation.

A very interesting book/study once let experts on their field make predictions and measured these against those of the interested general public, coincidence and reality. The result was that experts were not really better than anyone else in predicting the future, especially on fields with an extremely wide range of influence factors like politics. There are so many “ifs” and “given thats” surrounding the future development of something as big as a country that really nobody can make a sound guess that goes further than a few years – and even that only if one extrapolates and no unexpected incidents occur.  A crumb of comfort for Europeans: Out of many worrying developments in this world, this is one of the few where we can and should step back and just observe – neither do we have a chance of changing the course of events, nor will the events have a major impact on us.