China in 2035

Regular blog reader (and CRN Task Force member) Tom Craver points us to a recent article in BusinessWeek titled "What Will China Look Like in 2035?"

In years past, foreigners were skeptical about China, doubting whether it would ever become a stable society and have a decent economy. In years recent, foreigners are nervous about China, worrying whether China will take over the world (at least economically). But how do China's own researchers and leaders think about the future of the mainland?

Researchers at the Institute of Quantitative & Technical Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which is the official government think tank housing more than 3,000 scholars and researchers, have shared some of their insights with us. The institute's English-speaking director, Professor Wang Tongsan, says the forecasts assume a significant slowing of China's growth, but he warns that similar estimates proved wildly wrong in the past.

In the 1960s, forecasters assumed that China's gross domestic product would about double between 1960 and 2000, but the annual economic growth rate sped up so astonishingly that the GDP grew almost 17 times (in real terms). Even China's most sophisticated researchers sitting in Beijing and Shanghai did not appreciate how China's huge population enabled growth to exceed forecasts. The same conditions, he says, might be still true today, making forecasted numbers conservative.

What happened in China, of course, was not simply that a "huge population enabled growth to exceed forecasts."

What really happened was huge political swings -- from the bloody Mao-inspired Cultural Revolution of about 1969 to 1976, to the massive economic reforms led by Deng Xiaoping (following Mao Zedong's death) through the 1980s and 90s and still going on today.

Those changes were not foreseen before they occurred, and so their results could not be predicted. Thus, it seems tenuous at best to extrapolate from current trends and assume they will hold true. It's much more likely -- if history is any guide -- that current trends will not continue, and that some upheaval will occur to send China in yet another direction.

You can read the statements of "China's own forecasts for China 2030-2035" and judge their value for yourself. Among them, this one jumped out at me:

Science and Technology Level: The nation's level of science and technology will be hampered, the government researchers state boldly, by what they call the country's "serious, systematic deficiencies." They focus on two issues: the talent dearth and the poor state of intellectual-property rights protection. China will face a shortage of top science and technology talent in the next two decades, they say, due to the "existing talent nurturing system." Thus China must make full use of overseas-trained professionals, and those trained in the U.S., Japan, and Europe will play an increasingly significant role. The researchers then made the refreshingly honest statement that only if the market economy is fully developed, and only if intellectual-property rights are protected, can China capitalize on its economies of scale in R&D to become a major world innovation center. In all cases, China's basic sciences will still lag far behind the U.S.

I also found some of the reader comments on the BusinessWeek site to be interesting. For example:

Holly Garfield: I find much here totally unrealistic. The most worrysome to me is the personal income imbalance. Right now there are over 900 million people coming out behind after inflation. That has to change dramatically or the social unrest will make any past rebellions anywhere look tiny. Too many numbers here look like political posturing to take the numbers in the report seriously. The comments, rather than the numbers, are the key here.

Marcus Anthony: The thing all people must acknowledge about China's future is that it is a big question mark. There are no real historical precedents to rapid development on this sheer scale. Simply extrapolating from current trends is incredibly naive. You cannot simply say that growth rates will accelerate in linear or arithmetic mode. There are too many unknowns. Oil and water for example. The figures for China's predicted oil consumption may be conservative (according to the article) but the reality is that the world is running out of oil. What will China do then? Its entire system is being built on fossil fuels - a big mistake in my opinion.

J. Backstrom: One of the fundamental issues that especially other responses to these projections bring up is trust. Who and what coming out of China can be trusted, since at least our perception in the West is that PRC government censorship is comprehensive. This is a major issue for the PRC to grapple with in its becoming a superpower, especially if it wants to become a World Leader in other sectors.

Naturally, we can't conclude this review without bringing up the issue of transformative, disruptive technological developments, especially -- but not limited to -- exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing. For whatever reason, those factors don't seem to be accounted for in the projections of the Chinese researchers. We think making any forecast about the world two or three decades from now is a dubious endeavor, given the increasing acceleration of change.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Nato Welch]

"...only if intellectual-property rights are protected, can China capitalize on its economies of scale in R&D to become a major world innovation center."

Considering that China is making heavy use of GNU/Linux operating systems (a truly global product of the world, not of any one nation), I would hesitate to say that weak IP enforcement has hampered the Chinese at all, at least in the area of OS software.

Think about it - when you have next to no proprietary IP to begin with, and forced to choose between developing a dependency on foreign IP, or pulling down already-existing common global IP and contributing to it through peer production, what are you going to do?

If China overcomes its draconian limits on political speech, its lax attitude toward IP might just make it the most liberated information economy ever seen.