China Insights

In 1990 80% of the 1.2 billion population was considered to be in serious poverty, that figure now 0. The farmers don’t own the land, yet are motivated to the point where China is the most productive agricultural country in the world.

So much so that they are becoming so self sufficient in many products that they have no ‘cost of living crisis’ like the rest of the western world, not to mention the drug and crime problems that go with it. As abhorrent as we find it, you may be executed if you are carrying more than 1 gram of narcotics…..hell of a deterrent though….

While Trump is an open climate change sceptic, Beijing locals generally agree their summer temperatures have jumped 5 degrees in the last 10 years. Our democratic governments are overburdened with compliance requirements to get on with transitioning to ‘net zero’ power, no such thing here where the Xi led CCP party has made real progress installing wind and solar, although still heavily reliant on domestic and imported coal they are really the only superpower achieving realistic climate target expectations.

I took this photo of solar farms from a bullet train north of Beijing, I expect from a visual perspective this would have a lot of pushback in Aus/NZ. Their power cost averages US7.5c/kWh compared to our US20c/kWh.

They are quite sensitive to the western world’s perception of them, with no idea why Trump appears to hate them. When asked, I say to them the general perception is that of an overly controlling authoritarian regime that has little respect for human rights or democratic theories. They love President Xi though for lifting hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and at the same time controlling or minimising corruption and the associated corporate greed. I’ve certainly never seen a society where there visually isn’t extreme poor and extreme rich.

Agree or disagree leadership is top down and the majority trust and leave Xi to rule the country like a responsible parent, this trickles through society and children the same way accept their parents know better and heavily influence their careers and decision making.

On Saturday after having the most amazing Peking duck buffet lunch with my wife’s friends, their two teenage boys happily trotted off to their physics tutorial.

What I surprisingly witnessed was a window of 1.4 billion people living in relatively sustainable harmony…..more than the whole of Europe, America and us put together!