Jottings from the Granite Studio

Diligence China has a quality post on the landmarks of emerging markets–certain things to look out for as China makes the transition from “from self-loathing acolyte to over-confident preacher.” Two of these landmarks I thought deserved further comment.

A two stage process. Stage one – All of China’s historical problems were all either imported or the result of forgetting our own traditions. Stage two – Mining history for archetypes of new leaders. Look for Ghengis Kahn to be recast as the proto-Chinese leader. The Cultural Revolution was, somehow, a new management paradigm. Look for obscure writers to take on cult status — particularly when they demonstrate the superiority of Chinese organizational models.

We’ve seen some evidence of stage two recently, particularly the rehabilitation and subsequent Sinicization of Genghis . (Perhaps this is part of another of Diligence China’s landmarks: “claiming international brands as their own.”) The question of the source of China’s problems has a long and thorny past. There is the orthodox school in the PRC that claims that China possessed the ’sprouts of capitalism’ only to have those sprouts choked to death by the weeds of feudalism and then eaten by the pestilence of imperialism. Now we see more and more history used as a kind of ‘return to traditionalism’ whereby the past is held up as a form of national self-esteem building or as a way to provide society with the right influences as it becomes increasingly bereft of moral signposts in the headlong rush to make money. As Diligence China notes, we’ve seen this before on Taiwan, where one manifestation was a revivalist attitude taken towards historical Confucian figures such as Zeng Guofan or Zhu Xi. As it relates to consumer culture in China however, this is an interesting trend worth watching.

A second landmark in the post is “Anti-Nation nationalism”:

Chinese nationalism defined by how much better they are than the US, Japan, Europe, etc. It’s already happening to some extent – on a broad cultural level — but it will start getting more specific and granular soon. Look for Chinese to start ranking different nations and systems. German is better than French. American is better than British. In the early stages, Chinese will rank their own society in between the two. Two weeks later, look for the announcement that they have overtaken.

Coincidentally, The People’s Daily today reported that according to China Modernization Report 2007, by 2015 China will have modernized to the level of developed nations in 1960. Leaving aside for the moment that the standards mentioned in the report don’t really include anything like ‘quality of life’ or ‘chances of dying due to either environmental toxins or being run over by an out-of-his-mind Beijing driver’, the report pays close attention to China’s ranking in the ‘modernization index’ with rather specific statistic of China having accomplished 87% of its project first stage modernization. The goal of overtaking the West is an old one–One of the expressed aims of the Great Leap Forward was to overtake Great Britain in five years and the United States in ten. (Or was it 10 and 15?) Would it be so that quality of life could be quantified and assessed like market share and brand recognition.