ZOOM by Vijay Vaitheeswaran & Iain Carson

Author:Vijay Vaitheeswaran & Iain Carson [VAITHEESWARAN, VIJAY V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS000000
ISBN: 9780446408325
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

MANIFOLD DESTINY

The clean car of the future may come from

completely unexpected sources

CHAPTER SEVEN

Crouching Tiger, Leaping Dragon

Asia’s rise could save, rather than destroy, the planet

Two hundred years ago, Emperor Napoleon forecast that when China woke up, the world would tremble. The Middle Kingdom had a generation earlier slipped into a mood of isolation that saw it fall from being (with late-eighteenth-century India) the world’s biggest economy, as the Industrial Revolution swept Europe and North America to wealth and world dominance. Now, the sleeping dragon is at last waking up and stretching itself—and the world is indeed beginning to tremble.

Thanks to the extraordinary economic growth of recent years, China is the world’s fourth-largest economy by conventional measures; if measured in local purchasing power, it is already second only to America. By the middle of this century, its economy will be as big as America’s at market exchange rates. It is already the third-biggest car market, after America and Japan. The first Chinese car exports are beginning to reach Europe and the United States. In the ten years from 1995, Chinese car production went from 320,000 a year to 2.6 million. There are already twice as many mobile phones in China as in the United States, and within ten years, the Chinese will buy more cars than Americans. Ten years ago, 94 percent of the goods stocked on Wal-Mart shelves were made in America; today, four-fifths of the retail giant’s products come from China.

Some compare Asia’s rise to the recovery of Europe and Japan from World War II. But that was puny compared with what is happening in China and India. China has been growing at around 10 percent a year since it opened its economy to the world in 1978. It has doubled its wealth in the past ten years alone. America took almost two generations, from about 1870, to emerge as the world’s leading economic and political power by 1918. China is doing everything faster, leapfrogging its way to the top. The example was set in the 1980s and 1990s by four other nations in the region, the so-called Asian Tigers—Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, and Taiwan. They were the first nations to press the fast-forward button for economic development, to go from peasants and paddy fields to cars and condos in one generation. The children of poor subsistence farmers grew up to enjoy life in rich, sophisticated countries. But those tigers are tiny compared with the most populous country in the world. When the biggest nation, home to 1.3 billion people, does the same, the world will indeed tremble. When its steps are being dogged by what will soon be an even more populous country, India, a planetary shift is afoot.

Some economists and environmentalists think the emergence of China and India, in the way that it is having an impact across the whole world, is more akin to the rise of the Roman Empire or the discovery of the New World than to the economic boom seen in postwar Japan and Europe.

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