Our Real Blind Spot About China
We can't be more like them, but we can nurture our own home grown advantages
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/29/our-real-blind-spot-about-china/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+International#ixzz1wJYdpcg0
Two years ago, China launched an ambitious campaign to lure expatriate Chinese-born scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, particularly those in the United States, to come home to China. This “talent development” initiative,
reports the
New York Times, promises free housing, tax breaks, and signing bonuses up to $158,000, and reinforces a narrative loop in the threatened American
psyche: The human soul, mind, or spirit: first they got our jobs, then our dollars and debt, and now our talent.
But in his new book
China Airborne: Transported by air, James Fallows tells a story that’s more nuanced: A subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound and, in some ways, actually harder to bear. A longtime correspondent for The Atlantic who’s lived in Beijing and Shanghai, Fallows chronicles: Record (a related series of events) in a factual and detailed way China’s efforts to create a world-class commercial aviation sector from scratch. Assembling iPhones by hand requires only abundant unskilled labor. Making passenger jets that stay aloft: Up in or into the air; overhead requires an economy of such sophistication and interlocking complexity that it can truly be called first-world. And indeed, China’s aviation boom — with catalysts: A person or thing that precipitates: Cause (an event or situation, typically one that is bad or undesirable) to happen suddenly, unexpectedly, or prematurely an event ranging from well-connected tycoons to ambitious American advisers to provincial boosters — is a microcosm: A community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger of China’s epic rise. Where that country’s core assets can be brought to bear — scale, mass, will, central planning — breathtaking progress ensues: Happen or occur afterward or as a result. China, for instance, is building 100 new airports today; the U.S., one or two. They’ve created a giant aeronautic:Aeronautics (from Greek ὰήρ āēr which means "air" and ναυτική nautikē which means "navigation, seamanship", i.e. "navigation of the air") is the science involved with the study, design, and manufacture of flight-capable machines, or the techniques of operating aircraft. complex in Xian for 250,000 engineers.
Yet the Chinese have liabilities too. Those engineers have been trained more to follow routines than to adapt creatively to the unexpected. The state’s control the Internet stifles: Make (someone) unable to breathe properly; suffocate innovation. The reluctance of the People’s Liberation Army to relax its grip on airspace deters: Discourage (someone) from doing something, typically by instilling doubt or fear of the consequences aerospace entrepreneurs. The culture of self-dealing state capitalism makes foreign investment risky. The absence of transparent governance and public trust dampens citizen initiative.
These liabilities often go unnoticed by Americans because it’s harder to see the soft stuff (like culture) than the hard (like infrastructure.) For the same reason, Americans are often blind to our own strengths. I write this from Seattle, which remains the aviation capital of the world — and likely will for the rest of our lives. Here America’s assets are hidden in plain sight:is referring to something being in front of you without any type of obstructions blocking sight of it. our research universities, our venture capital ecosystems, our Boeings and Microsofts, our immigrants of all races and classes, our relatively open government, our web of voluntary associations.
But then, in the other Washington and on Wall Street, America’s liabilities lie also in plain sight. The body politic is crippled by severe, asymmetric: Lacking a common measure between two objects or quantities party polarization: (polarize) cause to concentrate about two conflicting or contrasting positions. CEOs and shareholders are obsessed with quarterly results instead of long-term economic health. Bankers still believe that financial engineering is engineering, and that making a casino killing is the same as creating social value.
It turns out a much earlier work by James Fallows may bear the more apt: Appropriate or suitable in the circumstances message for our times. Back in the late 1980s, when Japan was rising and predictions of American decline were rampant: (esp. of something unwelcome or unpleasant) Flourishing or spreading unchecked, he wrote that instead of wringing our hands and trying to be more like Japan, what we needed was to be — in the title of his book — More Like Us. We had to remember that America’s advantage, when activated, was its openness to talent from outside, its social mobility, its institutional support for equal opportunity, its amalgam: A mixture or blend of individual moxie:Force of character, determination, or nerve and mutual responsibility, its tolerance for change and risk, its essential pragmatism: (pragmatic) matter-of-fact: concerned with practical matters; "a matter-of-fact (or pragmatic) approach to the problem".
We know how that story ended: America rebounded and Japan, because of its own under-appreciated weaknesses, fell into a “lost decade.” How today’s story will end is still in question. What’s certain is that we should be less alarmed by reports of China’s methods than by reports of America’s underfunded universities, our money-drenched ideological politics, our concentration of wealth, and the meanness and myopia: Nearsightedness of our immigration policies. These things — not China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan or $158,000 signing bonuses – are what threaten American prosperity.
It’s worth remembering too that the transformation China must now make to create an economy with top-flight jobs is much more wrenching than the transformation America must make to keep such an economy. The difference is civic: a society’s talent is developed much more readily when institutions and incentives tip toward openness and freedom. And it’s much harder to create such institutions than to renew them.
As Fallows observes, leaders in China aren’t preoccupied with the U.S.; they are busy trying to hold their own centrifugal: Moving or tending to move away from a center, contradictory society together. But they surely note even today the rich evidence of insistent American innovation: from SpaceX’s rocket launch to James Cameron’s deep ocean dive to the Nobel laureates who still populate our research institutions and are exploring the frontiers of nanorobotics and brain science and the mysteries of the genome.
So let China take flight and let them do it their way. We can’t out-China China. But we can be more like us — and we’d better, in a hurry.
