卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Living in China is fascinating in very many ways; one of them is watching the transformation of values as prosperity spreads through Chinese society. The Chinese are, of course, just like everybody else: they want security, consumer goods, education… and that shouldn’t be any surprise; it’s odd sometimes to hear Western commentators (especially in the US) attributing more sinister reasons to China’s increasing demand for the resources needed for a better life.

The worrying thing is whether it can last - not just here, but everywhere. Looking at my RSS feeds, I see many worrying trends:

• the price of oil is rocketing - $200/barrel soon? - and that’s affecting our entire society. In the US, the consequences will be felt most of all; Paul Krugman talks about this in today’s IHT, for example.
• One consequence is the rising price of food, for example, partly because so much agriculture is based on oil-derived fertilisers, partly because of the substitution of crops for ethanol production instead of food crops. (This situation may soon get much, much worse as the Ug-99 fungus looks set to devastate wheat production throughout Asia and the Middle East).
• The rise in food prices has already sparked food riots in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What happens when people realise that their government is not capable of ensuring affordable food? Of course, they lose faith in the government and, eventually, seek more effective affiliations - perhaps criminal, or insurgent… and these groups are getting more and more powerful, with sometimes international or global influence. This is the kind of trend that John Robb is documenting in Global Guerillas, and it can make worrying reading. Just as a thought, who do you think will be strengthened by food riots in Afghanistan?

So the future looks tough. I don’t think it will necessarily be the Grim Meathook Future that did the rounds a year or two back; there will be technical fixes, and new discoveries, and political initiatives. At least, I really hope there will. Still, it’s worth reading and comparing two IHT articles on transition from abundance to scarcity and self-reliance. Which one would you choose for yourself?

1. Voluntary simplicity re-emerges. A renewed trend in the US of affluent, educated professionals shedding their possessions, and opting for a simpler lifestyle as on-line homesteaders, or techno-nomads.
2. Living off the land in a post-Soviet world. When their economic and political world collapsed, well-off skilled workers in Kyrgzstan were forced to become subsistence farmers. They were the lucky ones, perhaps, with land and clean water.

Like I say - which transition would you prefer? What’s the best way to prepare?

Are we heading for a global recession? All of the signs are that the US economy is now in recession. The next thing we find out is how much knock-on damage this will cause in developing markets. Are the Asian markets sufficiently decoupled from the US economy for India-China trade to keep everyone here afloat? We’ll find out in the next few months.

This recession, which was sparked off by the US housing bubble and compounded by bankers’ recklessness, has been a long time coming. Steven Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about it even before I took my MBA, so it’s not as if we haven’t seen it coming.

What has come up swiftly and without much warning, and may yet bite us hard, is the shortage of food staples - rice, especially. With a number of media sources warning of food riots and social instability as a consequence, this is likely to be tough all around.

The people who are going to suffer the most are the ones Niti is investigating at the bottom of the pyramid - and this is going to be very different from anything we’ve seen before.

I remember, as a child, seeing the pictures of the famine in Cambodia, and the appeals for public donations. I helped to organize a Blue Peter Bring & Buy sale at my primary school to contribute. Soon afterwards, the focus shifted to Ethiopia. Here I oversimplify horribly, of course, but in essence the famine victims here had to be essentially passive, waiting for external food aid to arrive.

In a lesser case of food shortage, citizens in the old Soviet Union had to opportunistically join queues as soon as they saw one forming, hoping it meant that a delivery of food or other scarce goods had just arrived - even when (famously) they often didn’t know what they were waiting for until they reached the head of the queue. This would just be luck of the draw.

What difference will it make when the poor, who are most desperately affected by food shortages, all have mobile phones? Will governments and aid agencies use it to inform people of deliveries, and in this way alleviate anxiety? Will be see spontaneous, SMS-directed “hunger mobs” flash-forming on the rumour of food availability (either delivery, storage or hoarding)? And what will it mean for us when instead of seeing appeals for donations on TV, the hungry millions are calling us for help personally?

Following my last post, I idly wondered whether YouTube had anything about China’s eco-cities. Here’s what I found:

Simulated flyover of Dongtan eco-city:

A BBC report on Dongtan eco-city:

Finland involved in the Tianjin project?

This was a surprise to me. My reading in the Straits Times here led me to believe that the Tianjin eco-city is a collaboration solely between China and Singapore, but - unless there are two projects near Tianjin - it seems that the Finns are involved as well. Who else? This clip is nearly 5 minutes long and, actually, doesn’t contain anything specific to the Tianjin project, but its YouTube page leads here.

More from China Digital Times: it seems that construction of the eco-city at Tianjin, a collaboration between China and Singapore, will begin in July.

It will be very interesting to compare how this goes with the concurrent Anglo-Chinese project being developed by Ove Arup near Shanghai.

There’s been a lot written over the last couple of years about the latter:

• Wired: Pop-up cities
• The Guardian: British to help China build eco-cities
• China Digital Times: China’s Green Revolution
• IEEE Spectrum: How to build a green city

Between those, and other, articles, there’s a lot of detail available on the design of the new city, Dongtan, near Shanghai. The Tianjin project, on the other hand, seems to have generated lots of press releases, but as yet I can find very little detail on how the city will be designed, or how it’s expected to work. I get the impression that the project is still in its early stages as far as design is concerned, even if construction is will commence soon. There was an interesting piece in the Straits Times recently which mentioned, IIRC, that Singapore would be bringing its substantial knowledge of environmental technology to the project, but that the experience gained in the project would be fed back into future urban planning back home in Singapore - so the project is, in effect, an opportunity for Singapore to experiment with green design and architecture in China, see what works and what doesn’t, and use the winning lessons to re-design “the Garden City”. An interesting strategy from Singapore.

Tianjin isn’t far from Beijing, and I wanted to go there anyway. Perhaps I should make a trip in July…