Moving forward to the past: China shows us how it’s done

Postcard from China

During nearly five weeks in China, I have become increasingly convinced that this ancient country is a model for the future of Australia and the West.

The key to this seeming paradox is the cellular or organic structure of its economy, contrasting with western economies which are far more corporate, industrialised, big scale and globalised.

The cellular, localised economies of China and Asia are far more resilient to the impacts of global crises both financial and environmental.

I was in South-East Asia during the Asian financial crisis of the ’90s. Our financial world had been rocked by this seeming trainwreck of ‘Tiger’ economies like Thailand’s, and pundits were predicting a global domino effect that would lead to – well – something like the present GFC.

But SE Asia bounced back with surprising energy and speed, once again dumbfounding economists who are renowned for explaining the causes of events they failed to predict.

The World Bank, still in the grip of neo-liberal free market ideology, prescribed severe spending cutbacks and corporations laid off workers, causing even more damage. Such was the view from the boardrooms of New York and Zurich.

But on the ground in Bangkok, no crisis was apparent. The same tuk-tuks were buzzing about, my favourite shoe repair guy was on his usual corner, and street vendors by the hundred were serving up pad thai, barbecued squid and the best banana pancakes in the world at the usual price of 10 Baht (around 50 cents*) just like they had been before the crisis. [*Now inflated 300 percent, and the banana pancakes can’t be found.]

I got the strong feeling that at street level, no-one had even heard of the crisis. After all, the same number of people needed to eat, the same farmers were bringing their produce into market, and life went on regardless of any stock exchange.

The only people actually suffering were the westernised rich who had dived into the corporate world – and their employees. A crisis that causes a large corporation to retrench, say, 10 percent of its workforce, makes no impact on the pad thai vendor. If indeed each one sold ten percent less in a day, that could be absorbed – all the more leftovers for the family, the chickens and maybe someone’s pig. A business with a single employee cannot lay off anyone, and an economy underpinned by small enterprises operating in localised economic cells is therefore more resistant to global crises than western economies.

Such street-level enterprise is practically illegal in the west, lest the streets of our rich, industrialised countries look a bit tatty or … Asian. Heaven forbid.

So we have less resilience when the crises hit, no stabilising layer of low-cost, street-level cash-based enterprise. If a crisis hits a large Sydney-based company, it will also lay off staff in Brisbane, Melbourne and recall executives from its foreign offices. This unemployment then impacts the rest of the interlinked national economy until the crisis passes and we start blowing up another bubble of some kind.

Of course Asian street vendors don’t earn much, and the gap between their incomes and that of their educated corporate cousins is widening. But the planet is also facing an environmental crisis, and this income gap may prove unsustainable as it drives ever-rising consumption by the rich [climate sceptics can stop reading right here].

Copenhagen was compromised by one prime underlying cause: “the West ain’t gonna give up its standard of living for no-one.” Unfortunately our sky-high western wealth comes with an equivalent carbon footprint. While China has been accused of deal-wrecking at Copenhagen, it says that carbon targets matter less than actual results on the ground and China is already way ahead of the West in that regard.

While the nabobs of Western boardrooms and governments may dismiss this, China’s position is amply borne out at street level.

Everything there is fine-grained compared to Sydney norms, the micro-economies, the architecture, the vehicles and the crafts. In a country of 1.4 billion people this is not surprising.

Each town or village is surrounded by hand-tended farms which feed it. Even in cities, any spare patch of ground is put to production. Outside a restaurant in Dali, China, you can get to know the chicken you may order for dinner that night. As you pass people’s homes you can hear their dinner being killed.

Your Sydney chook, on the other hand, was probably battery-farmed, killed and plucked on a production line, frozen, warehoused, trucked a hundred miles and warehoused again before its carcass hit the shelves of Woolies or Coles, bringing with it a carbon footprint far bigger than its own amputated feet. It was fed on a high-tech diet with food trucked from some other distant place, and perhaps fed antibiotics made overseas, and comes wrapped in plastic originating in a Saudi oilfield.

The Chinese pattern is intrinsically less carbon-heavy. Farmers get their stuff into market daily, travelling short distances in small vehicles, many of them human-powered. Before dawn, each village and town is a magnet for a picturesque cavalcade of bicycles loaded to the hilt, trishaw utilities, handcarts, ponies and carts, electric bikes or simply twin buckets carried on a yoke. The most common truck in rural Asia is a belt-driven one-cylinder diesel chugger that moves slowly but can carry incredibly heavy loads up the steepest hill. Results: major. Carbon footprint: minimal.

A bonus is the crisp freshness of Chinese produce. The apples and pears are sweet, crisp and juicy, like nothing available in a Sydney supermarket. The strawberries explode in your mouth with sweetness and flavour. Our strawberries by contrast are usually soft by the time they go red, or pale and acidic. It’s the same for the amazing array of greens on display outside every restaurant, kept fresh by sprinkled water and never seeing the inside of a cold storage room.

In Sydney, by contrast, we seem bent on building McMansions on the remaining Sydney farmland, locking ourselves into a high-carbon future.

A walk on the C13 walls of old Dali reveal a rooftop panorama of solar hot water units. The take-up looked to be about 80 percent, unheard of in Australia. I priced a unit in a local shophouse just big enough to display one – about $AUD400. Here, petrol is about equivalent to Sydney prices and power is expensive, so the payback time on an electric bike or a solar unit is rapid, and they are everywhere. For good measure, the mountains outside the city are crowned by a major wind farm while hydro-electric power flows from dams which are, alas, running low as China too experiences drought.

We may posture about climate change on the international stage but ‘deal-wrecking’ China is way ahead of us in practice as it takes the best of modern technologies and overlays them on an ancient economy in which waste is almost non-existent. As oil runs out and climate change wreaks its effects on our smug, rich, western economies, we will inevitably have to sacrifice our precious standard of living even as Asia races to catch up with it. Now, the poor Chinese peasant is on the bottom of the income ladder. But sooner or later the west will have to learn some lessons from that humble labourer.

And the funny thing is, these people who are living our future don’t have the shiny western lifestyle but they seem happier than we do. Chinese people often sing to themselves in the street, and move and interact in a far more cruisey and relaxed way than Sydneysiders. We could learn some lessons. Now if only I could work out why Chinese drivers blast their horns in a constant cacophony that is pointless because everyone ignores it?

by Michael Gormly