Winston Smith wrote on Oct 14
th, 2013 at 1:02am:
freediver wrote on Apr 30
th, 2007 at 7:00pm:
Diversity fosters innovation. Homogeneity leads to stagnation.
China seems to be doing quite well.
Good point. Why is China doing so well?
A lot of people have put it down to China's East Asia networks. In other words, rather than being a cosmopolitan
immigrant trading hegemony a la Amerika or Mother England, China is an
emmigrant nation, making use of all those emigres sprinkled throughout Asia and the world.
I wonder, however, how sustainable this is. China has not, so far, developed global product brands - a la Japan or South Korea. Its emigres are brokers - ethnic-Chinese contractors who set up shop in Chinese free trade zones and do piecework for the foreign branded corporations. It's a business model that has developed China, but what next?
What's next, I think, is a booming middle class looking for new novelties, and this will, inevitably, mean a huge cultural shift in China.
Homogeneity does lead to stagnation. It's why Deng Zhou Ping uttered his famous line about cats catching mice - it doesn't matter what colour cat catches the mouse, China became rampantly capitalist the day that utterance was delivered - that's if capitalism wasn't in the DNA of the Chinese people anyway.
The essence of capitalism is class heterogeneity. China now has an economic system that facilitates this, even if it's corrupt. Most of the sons and daughters of the princelings have Western educations or live in the West full time, and this is the Chinese model - outward, rather than inward looking.