Photos and impressions from China

This has been a pretty big year for travelling to emerging markets...it's defintiely been the theme for me, anyway. India, Brazil, China...Brooklyn. Ok, kidding about Brooklyn.

At the IBM event in China earlier this week I got a chance to hear
Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" pitch again. It's interesting to
hear him do it in front of a crowd of Chinese people as opposed to back
in the US. Either way, it's all about money, really. Who is going to
exploit whom? He says at one point, "It's either going to happen to
you, or you're going to do it to someone else." And by that he means being globalized.

You could read all this very cynically, of course, or choose to read it as something inevitable with a possibility for hope. Friedman outlines the three stages of globalization. First, he says, was Globalization 1.0, which was primarily prosecuted by nations. No big surprise there, nations were the only entities with the wherewithall to travel across the globe and haul stuff back (often taken at the tip of a sword, but still.) Then around the turn of the century came Globalization 2.0 -- that's the one we're so familiar with executed by corporations. Ok, again no big surprise -- you don't have to look much beyond the homepage of your favorite news source to see that in action every day. Hell, I live on the front lines of that battle.

But when he gets to Globalization 3.0 -- individuals -- my ears perk up a bit. Yeah, he asserts that the next phase in globalization will be carried out by individuals like you and me and Sanjeev and Raul and their peers in China, Eastern Europe and the rest of the developing world. With all this available bandwidth, anyone can hop on and compete for knowledge-based work from anywhere in the world. And with the advent of tools like Second Life (yes, I said tools, not games) virtual collaboration will get better and better until it ultimately obviates the need for most business travel. That's not next week, but sure it's not next century either.

Why does this make me hopeful? Well, it seems like there's a decent opportunity for people to regain some control of their lives and self-organize in ways that are decent and fair rather than hierarchichal, arbitrary and capricious. Can you imagine a world populated by billions of freelancers? That would be a market that ruthlessly favored talent and responsibility, wouldn't it? I mean, you would hire people based on their skills and reliability over any other attribute, wouldn't you? In my humble opinion, that's the kind of world I want to live in. It feels more like a meritocracy than the one we live in now.

Not exactly vacation
When I was walking through the forbidden city I walked into a show-room with all the armour and weapons of the Qing dynasty. Fascinating...it was mostly swords and spears along with some rudimentary firearms. One of the placards read something along the lines of "at the end of the battle it became clear that the weapons of the invading Westerners were far superior to those of the emporer's armies."

How about that? How about facing armies of far less sophisticated people (because really, the culture of the invading Westerners was cro-magnon by comparison to the Chinese) and being outgunned and conquered? I guess that's the case all over the map. but in some ways now the West is getting its comeuppance. This flattening world is proving that the mind and spirit of the folks in the conquered regions are just as capable. And now they're about to take back some of the advantage that was robbed from them.

If salaries in the West drop precipitously in equal measure to gains made in emerging markets i wouldn't be surprised at all. It's an inevitability. The West built up this luxurious life by extracting all that it needed by force. Let's just hope this equalization happens over a long enough period of time so that its not a shift characterized by wars and revolutions.

Freidman pointed out that if you asked him thirty years ago if he'd rather be a genius growing up in Bangalore or a B-student growing up in Brooklyn, the choice would be clear. The quality of life available to an average kid in the States far outstripped that of even the brightest kid in India. But now? The tables are turning...and fast.

PS. I bought a Chinese lute.