Howard Burton - China: Up Close and Personal - A Conversation with Karl Gerth

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2014, 2021 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-052-8

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I Filling in the World

II. History and Demography

III. Contemporary China

IV. Environmental Issues

V. Societal Values

VI. Catastrophic Scenarios

VII. Ever Onwards

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Karl Gerth in San Diego, California, on April 11, 2014.

Karl Gerth is Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History at UC San Diego.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

Full Circle

When Karl Gerth went off to college, he deliberately set out to study something as far removed as possible from anything he had ever experienced.

So when he first heard Ronald Reagans famous Evil Empire speech about the irredeemable moral turpitude of the Soviet Union, the rebellious young Karl was impressed, but doubtless not quite in the way that the American president had intended.

I decided that, if that old guy said the place was evil, then maybe it deserved closer inspection. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I read everything I could get my hands on regarding the Soviet Union and Russian literature. I had planned to take this literature and history course with a follow-up study tour of the Soviet Union.

But eventually, Karl decided against it. Why? Well, because it turned out that the Evil Empire wasnt really all that dissimilar from his Midwestern upbringing after all.

By the end of all that reading, I thought to myself, This doesnt seem that different to me. If Im supposed to be finding the polar opposite of something that I already know about, I want to find something much more different.

So it was that Karl found himself steadily becoming absorbed with China, from Kung Fu to the I Ching. Here, at last, was a world unlike anything he had experienced before.

Twenty-five years later, Karl is a highly respected Chinese scholar, the Hwei-Chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and Professor of History at UC San Diego, and an internationally recognized authority on contemporary Chinese consumerism and its manifold implications for political, economic, social and environmental policy, both in China and beyond.

His book, As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers are Transforming Everything, is an examination of these issues with often depressingly stark conclusions. In my conversation with Karl, the situation gets starker still.

There are at least ten different distinct things that could go horribly wrong, and any one of them would make things dramatically different. If it turns out that there was shoddy construction, or a natural calamity, at the Three River GorgesGod forbidthat would not only kill a large number of people, but it would also destroy an important part of the Chinese economy. How many more hundreds of thousands of people have to die from lung cancer? What are those people going to do as their source of food dries up and disappears? These problems dont seem like a one hundred years from now when the sea levels have risen problem; it seems fairly certain that one of them is going to happen.

Can anything be done to prevent this? Karl doesnt pretend to have all the answers, of course, but when I pressed him for possible solutions, he suggested some general policy trajectories that China might consider invoking to bypass a looming catastrophe.

He pointed out that, on the positive side of things, the country is hardly without resources for action. Chinese state-owned enterprises that control transportation, energy and telecoms are massively profitable, and there are a number of ways of envisioning using those resources for social good without necessarily slowing down economic growth.

I would make sure that those giant companies dont become entities in themselves that have their own interests. Id make sure that theyre properly reigned in, and that includes making sure that their wealth generation is being used not only for long-term potential, but something in the here and now.

These sorts of things are definitely possible and have been done before. Take development projects. You can demand something like, If you want to build a development, then you also have to build an elementary school. There are lots of possible on the ground compromises or pushes that can be made.

China is heavily constrained, Karl admitted, frequently being forced to choose between a spectrum of suboptimal, and often downright unsavoury, alternatives. There are no easy answers awaiting President Xi Jinping.

But when it came to the question of how the developed world might help, he was far less hesitating.

If we want the Chinese to create more environmentally-sustainable lifestyles so that we dont have to live with the consequences of their pollution, the way that they have to live with the consequences of our pollution because weve exported all of our pollution over there with all that messy manufacturing, then we have to set a better example.

Were already much wealthier than they are. What can we do to demonstrate a better compromise between better environmental regulation and short-term economic growth? Its not that we have to somehow go back to living in caves or cooking by fire or whatever, but finding some kind of better balance.

We should not just be critical of others, but also think hard about the question of where, exactly, we are providing good examples. We usually do that in the realm of individual human rights: were more than happy to point out how we have better practices than they doand we do.

But what else? There might well be other areas that have other kinds of global repercussions, especially environmental ones, where we could lead rather than hope that the Chinese might somehow magically come up with a way of becoming a more consumer-driven economy with better lifestyles but not trashing their environment or somebody elses.

The fact that we are all increasingly interconnected, in other words, doesnt simply mean that China is at the mercy of international influences and capital flows like the rest of us; it also means that there are increasing opportunities to address core problems both inside and outside of China.

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