China – a path to development
It may seem incredible to a nowadays China reader that, being 56 years old, I may say that during most of my life I hardly knew much about China. As a matter of fact, as an ordinary inhabitant from a distant young country, Argentina, I had only studied that what was “meaningful” to us was Europe and America and, China was an unknown territory far away to the East.
It was only few years ago when my attention was definitely caught by China’s steady and accelerated economic growth and development leading to a major new role in the world.
I started to study about this “phenomenon” learning that China is a millenary culture that had many centuries of splendor giving birth to all sort of breaking through advances in science and art. After that, a century of uncertainty came leading to the end of Imperial reign at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, there was a tragic period of external and internal fights thriving eagerly and desperately for another way of government. At last, in 1949, a new China was reborn and after some dramatic period of ups and downs, China could, finally, find a path to continue growth.
Having in mind that struggling past, what amazed me most about the new China was how a society of more than 1.000 million people, from very different economic and cultural backgrounds, was able to gather a huge mass of wills and resources in pursuit of a national interest. The outcome was a continue achieving of a better way of life than before for everyone, and thus reaching a massive wealth improvement, in my opinion, never accomplished worldwide before.
How could China perform such an incredible “miracle”? From my point of view, learning from their own history, going out from its isolation through watching beyond boundaries and melting all this experience in its own recipe. Following a steady plan, China began to build the most amazing set of infrastructure ever existed and thus, with the hunger of creating jobs for its growing population, became itself, step by step, in an efficient world factory. From then on they went on improving its manufacturing processes adding technology to accomplish cutting edge advances.
The Infrastructure works which were undertaken were the ones it could not be seen in other latitudes as they were really out of ordinary scale. It comes to my mind: the Qinghai – Tibet railway, The Three Gorges dam, the South to North Water Diversion, countless urban development and last but not least the on-going massive reforestation in the North to balance ages of deforestation which have caused harmful desertification. These outstanding endeavors showed that whatever plan the China government decided to carry out, it would use all the necessary resources to achieve its goal benefiting massive population all around the huge territory.
China’s cumulative financial strength has also helped to develop essential infrastructure in a wide range of countries which didn’t have the resources to wait for the economic returns of these long run commitments. An ultimate example of its world insertion is the on-going Belt & Road initiative to connect international markets through land and sea linking many isolated countries to the Global Value Chain. The key importance of this enterprise is that opens alternative routes to the already existing ones increasing the options to international trade.
In this way, China is showing the rest of the world the path of an on-going economically and socially sustainable growth without losing productivity. As a consequence, transferring progress globally through its efficient means of production at competitive prices and sharing monetary surplus by financing projects which are beyond the less developed countries scale.
The good news is that China continues betting on economic world insertion. By contrast, some important countries all over the world have become self-centered, not being able to take advantage of their capabilities to trade and interact with the rest of the world for the sake of global welfare.
To enrich this interaction with cultural matters, the government has spread Confucius Institutes all around the world to promote Chinese culture and language, helping people from very different countries, like me, to know about this interesting society.
Of course, many challenges arise every day when a country needs to provide increasing welfare to 1.400 million people who continually migrate from the countryside to the cities attracted by a better standard of living. Pollution issues are certainly among the major pending assignments.
From a social point of view, the most important challenge, also worldwide shared, the Chinese society has to face, is to assimilate all these economic changes countering the not wished wealth concentration trend that rising technology is generating in its path to development.
Lastly, in reference to Argentina, what boosted my interest in present China growth is realizing how complementary our economies are, as we are only 50 million people in a wide fertile territory which can provide massive food necessities to China. Argentina could learn from the China experience to find its own path of development, improving our supplies in quantity and quality in order to acquire competitiveness to become a first option to China’s endless demand
