China will shake the world

Westerners still don't fully understand how China will shake the world

By Peter Foster World Last updated: December 17th, 2010
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Barack Obama greets China's Paramount Leader, Hu Jintao (Photo: Getty)

According to the annual snapshot of Chinese society by the Chinese Academy of Social Scientists, despite rising living standards, ordinary Chinese are growing increasingly dissatisfied with their lot – or at least more dissatisfied than at any time in the last five years.
I wrote a report on this yesterday, but then this morning received an email from a reader pointing up Pew Research Centre data showing that while 87 per cent of Chinese feel their country is moving in the right direction, only 31 per cent of Brits feel the same way.
These polls might seem to contradict each other, but of course dissatisfaction is a relative thing. Chinese may feel like their country is moving in the wrong direction just recently, but they still feel, at heart, that things are better than ever. Recent interviews I’ve done on the street about Liu Xiaobo and in Beijing’s veg markets on inflation broadly confirm this.
People grumble about the rising price of fruit and veg, the petty censorship of the Net Nannies and the capriciousness of officialdom, but when you push them, they acknowledge that living standards have never been so good.
For all its many problems, China feels like a place “on the up” – which is one of the joys of living here – while Britain, from my conversations with friends, family and colleagues, feels suddenly very gloomy and insecure about its future.
In objective, measurable terms, the average Briton is of course far, far better off than the average Chinese, but they now wonder for how long? They worry about the national debt, about unemployment and Europe’s long-term economic prospects in the face of a rising China, India and Brazil.
Although I live for now in China, I share my countrymen’s feeling and perhaps doubly so because I see the energy, drive and ambition of China at first hand and know that, for all its flaws and difficulties, China is going to shake the world, one way or the other.
When I look at my children I know they’ll have to work harder, and be smarter in the face of stiffer international competition than I did in order to enjoy the same standard of living. As I’ve written before in relation to the UK education funding debate, there are simply going to be fewer free lunches out there. I sometimes feel that Europe doesn’t quite fully get what’s coming.
But equally, there should to be more opportunities if – and this is a big if – China, India and the rest of the world can work together and not against each other. Whether that happens, or not, will decide whether the 21^st Century goes better than that the disastrous, war-torn 20^th.
Right now, I find it hard to be optimistic. The mutual mistrust and misunderstanding between China and the rest of the world is deep, trade tensions are rising, as is (for different reasons) a kind of reflexive, nationalist defensiveness on both sides of the emerging-developed world divide.
There are no crystal balls, but maybe in the short to medium term global relations will have to deteriorate before they get improve: as they Chinese might say, perhaps we’ll all have to taste the bitterness of a “lose-lose” world before we come fully to appreciate the merits of a “win-win” one.