Just returned from Shanghai and wondering what’s the point of being rich if you can’t breathe? Okay, perhaps I am being over-dramatic but often one has to be to illustrate a point.
I was fortunate to have two clear days out of four in Shanghai but yet the one day I was out sitting in traffic, I could definitely feel the heaviness in my lungs and I thought of the millions and millions of people who have to live with it, day in, day out.
At the ICCA Conference I attended, Peggy Liu (left) who runs JUCCCE, a non-profit organization set up to accelerate the greening of China, sobbed twice during her speech on the pollution problems afflicting her country – from dead pigs in the river to polluted air. “I’d like my daughter not to ask why is the sky so blue when we travel,” she said.
First time I’ve seen a speaker cry during a keynote speech … okay, a tad dramatic too but she wanted to illustrate a point she obviously feels passionately about.
Hailed by the US media – Time named her Hero of the Environment in 2008 and Forbes cited her as “Women To Watch in Asia” in 2010 – Liu, a Chinese-American, said China has to find its own dream – 1.3 billion people cannot pursue the American Dream because it’d be a nightmare for the world.
“Success in the ‘American Dream,’ ” she says, “used to just mean a house, a family of four, and two cars, but now it’s escalated to conspicuous consumption as epitomized by Kim Kardashian. China simply cannot follow that path — or the planet will be stripped bare of natural resources to make all that the Chinese consumers want to consume.”
The “China Dream” project “seeks to reimagine prosperity and reshape consumerism in China. The goal is to catalyze a new aspirational lifestyle that is innately sustainable for the emergent middle class in China”.
She talked about education of grassroots, to use simple language that spoke to people as humans – clean air, safe food – and not technical terms such as “carbon emissions” and “climate change”, and “working with Chinese mayors and social networks, sustainability experts and Western advertising agencies to catalyze sustainable habits in the emergent consuming class by redefining personal prosperity”.
It wasn’t clear from her speech what the “China Dream” looks like exactly – and how she will achieve it on a mass scale – her organization boasts names like Richard Branson and James Rogers as advisors – and although some Chinese delegates in the audience thought her speech was “inappropriate” for a keynote slot, the essence of her message is noble.
Imagine if every Chinese owned a car or every Chinese flew – right now, only five percent of Chinese have flown according to someone who attended a low cost airline conference in Beijing that same week and the government is now looking at liberalizing low cost airlines …
Coincidentally on the flight back from Shanghai, I read a column by Thomas Friedman, “Too Big To Breathe” — and he mentions Liu and JUCCCE again and how the most important thing President Xi can do is to build the institutional support for the “China Dream”.
Also at ICCA, Kaiser Kuo (left), social and political commentator and blogger, addressed the two topics of Internet and innovation in the conference’s annual “Copenhagen Lecture”.
Kuo, who also holds the title of director of international communications ofBaidu, China’s leading search engine, said the term “the Great Firewall” was misleading because it implied an “Iron Curtain 2.0” as though “there’s a new dividing line between information that’s free in the West and information that’s controlled in the East”.
Truth be known, Kuo, a rock star in a corporate suit – he founded China’s first folk metal band, Tang Dynasty – said that the Internet in China is where art is created and social discourse happens. “It is incredibly vibrant and dynamic,” he said.
“The greatest importance is not that Facebook or Twitter are blocked but it’s the domestic censorship that Chinese people come up against – with 600 million people using the Internet, this is a big thing.”
He said three Chinese Internet brands stood out as innovators – Alibaba, Baidu and Taobao – and all three had a shot at global expansion. Alibaba is the most equipped to expand internationally, given its DNA as a platform for international products. Tencent is seeing a measure of success with its WeChat messenger app while Baidu would win in developing markets where Google is not so entrenched.
But Kuo’s core message was about the contradictions inherent in China and the questions that confound him as much as anyone else – how can a nation show such economic progress and yet we hear of stories of moral decrepitude or how can we balance stories of corruption with the very smart technocrats that run the country?
“If you feel conflicted, you are in good company.”
The key though is to take the time to understand the complexities and to move to “informed empathy” because “I don’t care where you come from but there’s no more pivotal factor in the world right now than the rise of China”, said Kuo.
