China & the New Silk Road - Lessons for Canada

I’m often away from the news these days and now and again I turn on the Radio. One day I turned on the radio and they were talking about the New Silk Road, a Chinese initiative to build “new” trade access to Europe and Africa. The initiative brings several Arab countries into the trade picture, looks to Russia and others. It is about infrastructure to connect trading regions, highways, railways etc.  It is a massive initiative, it is visionary, it is real leadership. In management we always look to find the BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the New Silk Road is such a thing.

The details of the initiative are less important than fact that China has gotten started on something that is interregional, that reaches out to many “incompatible” national actors and so promises peace and prosperity in the amalgamation of interests under the banner of trade. China sceptics will say this is all in China’s interests, I agree, that is only a problem if you believe China’s interests are mutually exclusive to other actor’s interests – of course, this is in no way the case. Other actors will only participate if they see value in the exchange. It does signal, however, that the “hermit nation” China once was, has now graduated even more dramatically onto the world stage.

Do I see a threat in this, yes – less from the fact that China is doing it and more from the fact that the West is so complacent it has failed to offer such leadership. We use to “do” leadership, Suez Canal, Panama Canal, Breton Woods, British Empire … you’re getting the picture – the west has too many chubby and comfortable people avoiding making waves to lead anymore.  China, by contrast, is emerging, emerging with the most powerful combination of authoritarian government, national homogeneity and a vigorous corporatist culture – if that sounds familiar it should, it is the combination the built the British Empire. We, rightly, let China into our markets so that it could transition from a generally reduced state to be a player at par on the world stage – they and we have a responsibility to ensure measured progress; they in working toward liberating the masses and us in exercising ourselves robustly.

When the wall first fell, there was optimism in the world – we were talking about building a bridge over the Bearing Straight – a North America / Europe connector – I remember my heart leaping at the prospect. Have we wasted that opportunity by mismanagement – perhaps? I think that Russia could be convinced to contemplate such a project – imagine the impact if you will – of a Trans-world highway with a cloverleaf exit to the New Silk Road and inter-modal ground transport from Montreal to Johannesburg. It would have been nice to have initiated such a proposal and hence been able to more effectively define the project, now our only option is to augment and then compete to gain influence in what promises to be one of the most revolutionary “infrastructure” projects in world history.

China has in the main developed infrastructure that pays, that is, national high-tech infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, human capital infrastructure – there has been some overkill in some areas certainly, however, the focus is correct. There is an adroitness in an authoritarian government that can and has in Canada’s case, get lost in democracies. Further, there is longevity in policy, a course is plotted and taken to fruition. This can be a bad thing too, as was the case with the Great Leap Forward that resulted in some 30 million souls starving to death – there is a balance to be struck to be sure.  The embrace of market incentives and a free market stance generally and trade has made a dramatic difference in the progress of the country.

So what’s the takeaway from China’s success for us, Canada, the provinces and communities? First, sit down and clearly define a 25 year and 50-year infrastructure program founded on consensus from interest groups, commit to the program via legislation that isolates it from the rigours of the political process, and execute with vigour and integrity.

What would this infrastructure program look like?

1.       Education – no buildings – intellectual capital

a.       Intellectual Capital is infrastructure – I submit the most important infrastructure, the challenge we have is convincing people to donate time and energy toward valuing it and communicating that value in dollars and cents – the language universally understood by all.

2.       Big pipes for the internet and a world network of server stations

3.       Nationwide Communications

4.       Road, Rail, Sea and other transport – Transmission Lines, Pipe Lines etc.…

5.       Conservation, the general greening of infrastructure, infrastructure support for alternate energy sources.

China’s intellectual capital is growing exponentially, China generates 300,000 engineers annually, we do a tenth of that – engineers apply technology. The world’s knowledge is nearly doubling every 6 months – the fax machine was invented in WW2 and the technology only gained penetration into the population in the 1970s. We need people to convert a mountain of latent technology into usable products and services, it is the world’s weakest link – Canada needs to occupy this space. Disruptions like a transistor radio, the computer will become a weekly event – so knowledge acquisition can no longer have a massive institution attached to it with four, six and eight year time frames to action. In WW2, the time it took to train a pilot was measured in weeks, basic training was six weeks – they were farm boys who had just left the age of horse farming – surely we can get a doctor up and running faster than eight years or a carpenter faster than four years. We are warehousing our best, brightest and most vigorous population in universities for nearly a decade, think about what they could do if they learned on the run as I have and many others have. It is far more efficient to set about a task and collect the knowledge needed for that task than to try and educate yourself for every eventuality or contingency; properly structured knowledge transfer can do this – self-paced, independent and freely accessible are the order of the day.

While China’s infrastructure program is less than perfect, it is better than ours. The Chinese transformation has lessons for us, we would be wise to avail ourselves of them and act decisively. If we meander along as we have, or let the political pendulum send us to and fro, the Chinese assent will be both wasted on us and will likely consume us. 

Want Diversity, Prosperity - FOSTER INDIVIDUALISM

Individualism is a modern phenomenon, the concept can only find expression in a circumstance where society is big enough, easy enough and people are isolated enough to be able to survive absent a tribe. Individualism is constantly corrupted by the collective and the massive mass media narrative that is at play now in the world. Individualism is in large measure a spawn of the United States, an order, which aspires to deliver personal choice – the first of its kind in history. I love individualism as it merges with democracy and common law, because, at once, people act with autonomy and it is required that they respond to the interests of others; this is a beautiful thing.

It seems that when you get more than a couple of people acting together, autonomy gets challenged, especially in modern society, where groups tend to coalesce around a “special interest”. “Special Interests” are okay, what is unacceptable, however, is the way in which the actions of people associated with a special interest tend to become associated with “left” or “right” or one political brand or another. At the very moment, an issue becomes attached to a political brand, it gets distorted because politics are about power first and policy second. Given that in a democracy to forward an idea, one needs political mass (power), acquiring political mass requires accommodating large numbers of people and in the accommodation of large numbers of people, distortions occur. It is optimum to seek solutions to issues rather than distort issues to suit power, which rarely happens. By nurturing the Individual, by creating self-supporting, self-sufficient, independent people we begin to fracture “the group” and/or “group think”. This is a healthy thing, as it permits people to bring a critical mind to challenges.

Individualism in the modern context of social media, has “individualism” in effect being a branding exercise, one hopes that the broad-based ability to “mediafy” one’s self begins to fracture the narrative – under the “post WW2” mass media regime we were slotted into a bi-polar, tri-polar – or a limited polled political space and then slotted into one of about 6 or 7 stereotypes. The old media space held control over the populace’s thought under a narrow spectrum of competition; the modern individual is able to draw on, and build the “individual” from a broader spectrum in the social media space; allowing for a nuanced projection of self and a general societal circumstance of a more nuanced perception of others. Further, the coalescence of micro-topics or interests “on the tail” brings oddities into the mainstream as they gain resolution in a manner that would have never occurred in the past, generating a circumstance where “individuals’” emerge in a more varied and nuanced way. This is a beautiful thing as well, it is being challenged by the increasing regulation of the internet space – governments are seeking to once again restrict and control the data that feeds the narrative – as, where the narrative goes society goes. This is the paradox, the broader and more varied the data field, the broader and more varied the individual becomes; this well-spring nearly always brings disruption, and disruption scares the established and the established seek to suppress disruption - yet we need disruption to advance.

We must seek to enhance the individual, to foster diversity; individuals are rarely birthed in large monolithic institutions, in fact, large monolithic institutions are hostile to the individual. Institutions “haze” individuals out of existence or the bell curve does and forces them to fit the mould, rather than liberate them from the mould. Every individual is a point of emergence, we can smother that emergence with dogma, and conformity, thereby, retaining “norms” & “stability” OR we can seek at every opportunity to feed the creation of individuals that emerge un-subdued by the “old” and embrace the disruption that they bring us.   

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