China: where are you going?

China is expected to become the world’s largest economy by 2025.

Since the beginning of the “Deng” era and the reform & opening up period lead by Den Xiaoping (1978), China joint the race toward the development and the economy growth. Indeed China economic performance in the last 20 years has been impressive, the growth has been exponential and all the entrepreneurs I met here keep talking about “China: the leap frog”.

This country is facing an incredible progress and instead of a linear growth China is “jumping” from an underdeveloped phase to an environment where high tech and innovation are at the center of the development. Internet has indeed a central role in the Chinese progress and is accelerating the economic development.

But China what kind of development are you running toward? Do you want to become a better copy of the capitalism model? Do you want to be the new USA? are you willing to loose your traditions and culture for the globalization?

It is quite clear China first objective is to be the number 1 player in the worldwide economy and this country is pursuing this goal at any cost.

Some interesting data we have been analyzing during our course on “Entrepreneurship in China”:

-The same people who didn’t have a fixed telephone line few years ago, own tablets and smartphones today

–778% video ads growth

–314.000 M$ Chinese e-commerce market value

–8.000$ online games market value

–96% of the Internet traffic visits are internal, only 4% goes outside China

-The Chinese Facebook has the same amount of users Facebook has worldwide

-The Chinese company Tencent is the biggest Internet company of the world

Considering the current situation, the population growth, the fast development, the first question coming into my mind regards the sustainability of this growth.

Where is the sustainable development? What is the role of corporate responsibility? Is China concerned about the environmental consequences of this exponential growth?

I am afraid sustainability and environment are not the priorities and despite the fact “go green” is one of the objectives of the China Five years plan, there is still much to do in this area.

During our study trip we visited several companies, Spanish and Chinese and we saw the same situation in all the facilities: employees working in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, lack of safe waste management and unreliable recycling process. When we asked our guide about quality control, certifications and recycling procedures she answered “growth first, later the environment”, this expresses very well what are the priorities for those companies at the moment.

So again..China continues its race toward the progress, the innovation and the growth but a development without sustainability is not feasible, especially in a 1.3 billions people country. So what kind of development will China achieve? where human development? and finally.. where is China going?

Time will tell if this country will be able to achieve a sustainable development.

4 comentarios / 07 Mar 2013 por Veronica Recanati
IMSD /

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