One of the most mind-boggling statistics that I’ve ever come across in all my reading was the one by Vaclav Smil on China’s cement consumption:
In 2018 and 19, China produced nearly as much cement (about 4.4 billion tons) as did the United States during the entire 20th century (4.5 billion tons)
Let that sink in.
Despite being our next-door neighbour, China is a country that few in India really engage with. While the language is a barrier, the political tension is an added hurdle. When China was integrated into the WTO in 2001, few in the world predicted its rise as a geopolitical colossus that would threaten the entrenched post-WWII order. The biggest story of our lifetime has been this evolution of China from a laggard to becoming the factory of the world.
Dan Wang’s ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’, is written primarily for an American audience but has some important lessons for India to ponder upon too. He begins by arguing that the fundamental difference between the US and China is that the American elites have been taken over by the lawyerly class with expertise in litigation and regulation while the Chinese have nurtured a technocratic class made up of engineers that has mastered the art, science and engineering of hard construction.
Take the case of the city of Guizhou. Few of us must have heard of this city. But for an obscure city:
Guizhou has built forty-five of the world’s one hundred highest bridges. It has eleven airports, with three more under construction. It has five thousand miles of expressways, ranked fourth among provinces in China by length. It has around a thousand miles of high-speed train track. Guizhou’s infrastructure isn’t made only of the twentieth-century stuff of steel and concrete. Guiyang bills itself as a “big data valley,” touting that its cool air can lower heating costs. Enormous facilities housing data servers make Guizhou emblematic of the modern infrastructure that powers AI too.
How many cities in India can compare to this? Mumbai inaugurated its first metro connecting Cuffe Parade with Andheri last week! Delhi is arguably an urban slum. Transit in Bangalore is a nightmare. And Chennai has an airport that gets taken over by a river when it rains.
The tweet below, which went viral earlier this year, shows the quality of life in Mudanjiang – an obscure Chinese city which even most Chinese would be unaware of. If you’re an Indian reader and can point me to a similar city in any Indian state, please get in touch. For the record, we have 404 statutory cities and 7000 plus towns.
How does China pull this off? Wang explains that the political leadership of China often behave as hydraulic engineers:
It feels like China’s leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.
The worst excess of this feature was undoubtedly the one-child norm introduced by China in 1980. In the thirty-five years that the policy survived, China carried out close to 321 million abortions and sterilized 108 million women and 26 million men. The number of girl children killed due to this draconian policy can run into millions. Today, China has more than 30 million men than women.
Fun fact – Qian Xinzhong, the Minister of Health and Director of the National Family Planning Commission, who was responsible for overseeing and enforcing population control measures was the first winner of the UN Population Award, when it was instituted in 1983. He shared it with another person – Indira Gandhi, the only Indian Prime Minister who embarked on a brutal policy of forced sterilizations during the Emergency.
For an impactful understanding of the tremors that China went through during our and our parents’ lifetime, read this excerpt:
A person born that year (1949 when Mao founded the Republic of China)—let’s call her Lu— would live through several of China’s utopian experiments, which curdled into terror campaigns led by the state. Lu would be born into a country torn apart by Japan’s invasion and a civil war, yet hopeful about Mao’s promise of communism.
Around age ten, Lu would suffer some degree of food shortage as she lived through Mao’s push to industrialize quickly. That was the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions perished from agricultural collectivization, quack agronomy, natural disasters, and Mao’s order to melt down household tools for metal—all leading to mass starvation that forced people to forage tree bark to survive.
At age eighteen, Lu might have just missed her chance to attend college as Mao shut down higher education. “Rebellion is justified,” he told students while launching the Cultural Revolution. “Bombard the headquarters,” he instructed youths while sending them into the countryside.
If Lu decided to have a child after the age of thirty, she would have run into the One-Child Policy. Over the policy’s three-and-a-half-decade duration, China conducted nearly as many abortions, according to official figures, as the present population of the United States.
If Lu had given birth at age twenty, her child might have attended college in 1989. That spring and summer, students led protests throughout the country, most prominently in Beijing. By June, Deng Xiaoping declared martial law and deployed the army to mow down students from the country’s most elite colleges.
A few years after the killings around Tiananmen Square, China’s economic boom began in earnest. But as Lu turned seventy and entered the twilight of her life, she would feel one last spasm of a state-led terror campaign: lockdowns in the pursuit of zero-Covid. Depending on whether Lu lived in an unlucky city, she might not have been able to leave her residence for weeks.
But change the year of birth by a decade, and outcomes can shift spectacularly.
Someone born in 1959 would have no memory of famine. Call this luckier citizen Yao. By the time he turned eighteen, Mao would have died, and Yao could have earned a spot in university just as Deng was reopening the schools.
As he turned forty and entered the prime of his career, he might have established a business that capitalized on China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Also around then, if he were an urban resident, Yao would benefit from China’s housing privatization.
As the state moved to dismantle socialism, it offered homes to urban workers for a song. It was one of the greatest wealth transfers in history: if Yao was among the elites who owned real estate in Beijing and Shanghai—two of the world’s most expensive cities—he could have become prodigiously wealthy.
To better understand Deng’s economic reforms, you could check out Joe Studwell’s ‘How Asia Works’. (Earlier post on it). Bertaud’s ‘Order Without Design’ was also a memorable read on the role of planners in allowing cities to thrive and grow (with beauty)(Earlier post on this).
If we need to catch up, we need to fix our manufacturing base, clean up the mess that our municipal bodies are, invest in high quality infra, deregulate and get more wealth into people’s pockets. Easier said than done since every component of this would in turn require investments on skills, healthcare and social cohesion. Just declaring ‘I wont buy Chinese products’ won’t cut it.
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