The real future
Having spent much of the last two years talking about the present and the past it has been a real challenge to get focused on the future. Much of that challenge comes from the political and continuing economic disasters we face in the post industrial world. The challenge of even having a future in the US as the Trump train wreck daily videos has kept the majority of the population in fear and depression. But Trump and his personal disaster will be gone soon, one way or another, and we need to look at what has been chnaging around us as a result.
While my natural focus is on technology and human response to that, the governmental and human side of AI and automation is equally important to the economic side. However it works out, the US is finished as a imperial power and this was long determined with Trump being simply a catalyst accelerating the change. China is the future. That presents an interesting juxtaposition for me, personally, as I was a student and teacher of of East and Southeast Asian history before moving to IT professionally. That has worked well for me as China has grown into a tech powerhouse over the last forty years and includes some involvement with the Ministry of Education in Beijing and a several Chinese IT ventures over the years.
China begins to dominate
Even by conservative estimates, China will be dominant politically and economically by 2030. That is very soon. If Trump and his cohort are not removed soon greater and more radical change will result. The effects of this shift are already having an impact on business economics and political recalibrations around the planet but will begin directly influencing ordinary people’s lives in the next two to three years. What does this mean?
A new model of government and technology will become dominant. This will be very different from the Western Enlightenment model of Europe and the US centuries. China has about five thousand years of continuous historical development under a broadly consistent cultural model and many strong traditions that have proven socially and administratively effective. This is not as apparent to many in the Western world as the last two hundred years of Chinese history happened to be a period of decline coinciding with the rise to dominance of the West. China is rising to dominance again and has a much stronger record of learning from the past than we do in our mixed Graeco-Roman-Arabic tradition.
The nature of Chinese dominance puts the emphasis on unique Chinese answers. These have been historically better for management of change and technology than the west at times as illustrated by the origin of much early modern technology in China. In fact the European renaissance and Age of Discovery were driven by the adoption of Chinese technology. Again this has been mostly unknown to the Western mass population that were raised on images of starving Chinese in the western induced disasters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even the university systems of the west got by with only Western History as a freshman requirement until the last thirty years. That will change quickly now with knowledge of modern Chinese history, world order models, and technology, not to mention language (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu), becoming critical for business and travel. So what will our Chinese influenced future look like?
A different technology business model
A look at contemporary Chinese technology is helpful. China leads in mobile technology with several times the number of users than the US. It also uses it’s own technology via Chinese companies that have been carefully preparing to move fully international when the time was right. The time is here. Social media in China is distinctly Chinese but with fully integrated ecommerce systems with half hour delivery in major cities. The important point is that these systems are planned and balanced with market realities. It is a hybrid system with very careful and academically driven technological development released to the market through a managed entrepreneurial layer of companies. These companies work with engineers trained in China and abroad with close ties to foreign tech companies. This is known and usually highlighted in the West by attempts to block Chinese purchase of companies and technology. Increasingly the technology is and will be Chinese. For the US it is Indian and Chinese students working in US universities doing much of the original research as they have been for thirty years. A very good survey of this from the technical business side is available from Enrique Dans in China is the Next World Leader.
Obviously China does not have a tradition of democracy as an ideal. In fact quite the opposite.
Obviously China does not have a tradition of democracy as an ideal. In fact quite the opposite. The preferred structure is the educated and sensitive scholar as official carrying both official and unofficial authority. Chinese tradition is much more authoritarian but that is easily misunderstood, again, because of the last two hundred or so years of seeing China at it’s weakest while misunderstanding how it works at its best. This has and will allow China to continue to develop and implement technology rapidly and efficiently. As Enrique Dans points out this can be very attractive for tech companies who have had to struggle with western limitations driven by diverse groups demanding protections. This is not something that we can judge easily but we will have to deal with it as the emerging dominant model in the coming decades. The positive of this is the Chinese focus on Paris and their full efforts to lead the struggle on climate change. There is no anti-intellectual tradition in China to get in the way of planetwide issues that must be dealt with for our survival. From a purely pragmatic and survival perspective that is cause for hope particularly in the US in the wake of the Trump disaster.
The areas of greatest difference and effect is obviously the replacement of the western concept of strong individualism that has served as a model of individual rights with a focus on social responsibility and intellectual/academic competence as the idea. This is very different from the US model that has never overcome a combination of ignorance and anti-intellectualism as equal to study and formal system knowledge. It will be interesting to see how this goes. I can only guess that the tradition of ignorance masquerading as religion will continue to drag the US down as the world shifts away from this. At the same there are strong modern mass religious traditions in China that are in continuous conflict with official Communist Party policy as atheist. Falun Gong, a very popular spiritual practice based on Buddhist law (dharma) has some 70 million members in China although all religions traditions are being actively discouraged since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Interestingly Falun Gong has a large international following and fits nicely into the new spiritual practices replacing traditional religions in the west. Falun Gong members have staged mass demonstrations in China but are peaceful and specifically focused on environmental issues and sustainability closely tied to current scientific knowledge. Even this is very different than in the US.
New concerns replacing some of the old
Obviously there are major concerns in this shift to a China dominant world. Censorship has always been part of the Chinese tradition and is being very actively asserted with great firewall blocking unwanted information from the Chinese population. Changing this must be a major focus in the decades to come. The open flow of information has been an important right that the Chinese have struggled to deal with and most recently have been failing. There will need to be a continuous effort to maintain routes of information as Chinese attitudes extend to make censorship acceptable as it has been to significant elements of the US population historically.
One Chinese tradition that will have an interesting effect as business becomes more influenced by Chinese dominance economically is the absence of racism in Chinese. The Chinese have been focusing economically and politically on Africa as that will become the source of resources and people as development and education continue. While this may be confusing to people, Chinese culture distinguishes only be Chinese (Han) and all others. And the pattern has been not race, as we know it in the west, but civilization and culture. China has been ruled twice by non-Chinese people and this has been Mongolian groups in both cases. While there are internal ethnic tensions between groups in China and the Chinese government these are based on religion or nationalism as the defined problem rather than purely on race as in the US. This will be an area of difficulty for the US as it loses ground to China in Africa and around the planet.
This is a very cursory view of some of the changes that are coming very quickly now as decline of US influence accelerates. In twenty years the planet will be a very different place and the unsolvable problems that have finally crippled the US may finally be corrected but only with the dominance of China. Needless to say the general movement for the last fifty years toward public services with limited open markets or what is generally termed democratic socialism as the most successful form of government is going to be pushed toward planning with the Chinese hybrid communist/market model. We will all be involved in how the Chinese system evolves to deal with individual rights recognition and freedom of information while retaining their current efficiency in technology development and implementation.
