China and the Chinese
The Chinese and Me
December 26, 2004
Here we are, arriving at the end of December 2004. The worse it gets, the worse it gets. Bush has been re-elected and named Man of the Year by Time Magazine. Putin is flirting with the Chinese. They are preparing to commercially overwhelm us, wielding an irresistible weapon: their vast population and low labor costs. In China, the age-old danger—famine—has been overcome. A salary of 40 euros per month is considered miraculous. Workers in companies are in no way disturbed by sleeping in dormitories on their workplace premises. In this immense country, there is a powerful network of "powerful people." Social inequalities will grow vertiginous. Colossal fortunes will be amassed. In China, being rich is by no means shameful. On the contrary, it is poverty that discredits the individual. A man living in China once wrote to me: "If you have no money, don't expect to be able to marry." When a Chinese person has money, he shows it off, flaunts it, and his compatriots envy his success. There is no shame in being a "new rich" there.
One day, "the stock exchange of Beijing" will impose its rule. In every country where Chinese expatriates have settled, they have always proven to be excellent merchants. The ideological foundation is simple: everything must be done to defeat the West and ensure China's greatness and power. It is the Eastern version of "get rich." The most fantastic economic war of all time has just been declared. Similar phenomena can be found in India or in many Eastern, Arab, or even African countries. Equality between men and women, and the concept of inalienable rights, are considered "extremely modern." In the end, history can only repeat itself. People emerge from their era of subsistence agriculture, scratching a meager patch of poor soil, escaping famine and epidemics to enter the benefits of the industrial age. Moreover, Westerners, driven by profit and attracted by high returns, provide everything, reassured by the country's political stability and guided by iron hands. They "offshore," exporting the entire production tool. You have a factory in France, your employees cost too much? Export it, turnkey, to the outskirts of Nankin, where intelligent and cooperative people await you, supported by a docile and cheap workforce. What's amazing is that you can even offshore a company piece by piece, depending on skills and specialties.
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Tremendous upheavals lie ahead. Globalization will be accompanied by spectacular and unprecedented economic booms. Industrialized countries will offer... industrialization, turnkey. In return, "poor countries" (at least those capable of intelligently absorbing this industrialization) will offer high profit margins tied to low wages and minimal social protection, making them unbeatable in competition. The old opposition between capitalism and Marxism has vanished. Once, the Soviet Union had industrialized at the expense of its peasantry, in an autarkic manner. If the Chinese wanted to do the same, it would take them... centuries. So instead, they will massively import their industrialization. For a Chinese person, having an apartment in a skyscraper, a television that effectively indoctrinates him more subtly than a presidential speech, public transportation enabling him to follow the "work-metro-sleep" routine, a CD and DVD player, and perhaps, for some, a car, represents an unimaginable luxury.
China possesses a technological and scientific tradition far older than ours. Its ships sailed the world's oceans at a time when we barely dared venture onto the waves with fragile vessels. In fact, they invented multi-sail rigs and watertight compartment hulls. They are creative, ingenious. They invented numerous things that constituted revolutions in their time: paper, for example, but also printing, gunpowder, the compass, cast iron, stirrups, mechanical clocks, cranks, and watertight compartment hulls. Today, millions of Chinese are learning our languages at breakneck speed. Everything develops there at an enormous scale. We've just learned that an agreement on textile import quotas has just expired. China is about to enter the arena with firepower unimaginable to us. Countries like Tunisia and Morocco, traditional subcontractors for clothing, risk being swept away like straws, with no alternative in sight. The manufacturing activities of Arab countries remain very limited. When the oil windfall eventually dries up, the shock will be damaging. China, on the other hand, can attack on all fronts, at all levels, producing everything from bathing suits and toys to machine tools, automobiles, airplanes, microprocessors, or software.
I'm going to tell you a true story, a lived experience, one you'll reflect on. It was in the mid-1980s. A conference on MHD was taking place in Boston, and I somehow managed to attend. Everyone wore a gloomy face. The American civilian MHD advocates lamented, hoping for better days, while at a distance the Aurora project was developing in the laboratories of Sandia and Livermore. The Russians arrived, showing us their pulsed MHD generator "Pamir," a huge camembert-like device five meters in diameter, transported on enormous trucks. A flow compression machine. Officially, it was supposed to be a device for measuring the electrical conductivity of the ground over long distances, in an attempt to predict earthquakes by detecting variations in electrical conductivity.
Then two Chinese arrived. One was elderly and very learned, the other barely thirty, looking at everything with wonder. Clearly, the latter had never left China. His boss gave us a one-hour presentation without a single muscle in his face twitching. We saw an endless series of slides projected, with graphs and curves. It became evident that over the past twenty years, the Chinese had done exactly the same things as Westerners and Russians. They had tested "open cycles," aiming to convert energy from the combustion of hydrocarbons or gasified coal into electricity. They had built closed cycles, experimented with two-temperature systems, toyed with Vélihov instability. Sitting beside me was a Texan, sporting an awful multicolored tie, barely able to contain himself.
"But how is it possible," he muttered under his breath, "that we could have ignored all this? We have satellites, for heaven's sake!"
"My dear fellow," I replied, "when using your satellites to locate research centers, you're trying to spot vast buildings with geometric shapes, flanked by enormous parking lots filled with countless cars. But you've seen with your own eyes what a cutting-edge research center in China looks like: an old cement plant, whose parking lot is filled with thousands of bicycles."