Introduction

China today is a train traveling through a lightning storm. None of us are spectators; all of us are passengers.

—A Chinese user of Sina.com’s Weibo, a Twitter-like Internet application, July 24th, 2011

On the night of July 23, 2011, China’s perceptions about its society, its leadership, and the direction in which the country was developing shattered like a mirror under a hammer blow. Even the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was forced to recognize its own disjointed reflection in the glare of the frightful lightning strike that changed the course of the central government’s momentum for global leadership status. A high-speed train traveling nearly 400 kilometers per hour (240 miles per hour) came to a crawl and then a full-stop when lightning struck the high-tension wire that had lured it through the mountainous countryside. Night poured into the disabled train, black as pitch. Suddenly great sparks sprayed from the tail-end of the marooned vessel as another express train smashed into it like the hammer of a gun firing its load into the gully below. Forty people died that night. Two hundred more were injured.

Just three weeks before the incident, CCP officials were extolling the virtues of their super-fast trains to the international community. They charmed the Americans with the promise of cheap high-speed rail to lace together its far-flung cities. They told the Germans “finder’s keepers” in reference to the train technology the Chinese had acquired from the Europeans and now exported to other countries. They extended, too, a metaphorical middle finger to their arch-enemies, the Japanese, who had warned the world months before that the Chinese leadership was driving trains too hard, too fast, and using Japanese technologies not thoroughly tested on Chinese rails.

Within hours of the accident, the Ministry of Railways buried the damaged coaches in heaps of earth not far from the bridge where they had cascaded. Some Chinese who viewed the video of the cover-up claimed to have seen unrecovered bodies still flopping around in the cars. Nevertheless, one little girl named Yiyi was discovered still alive nearly a day after the accident as officials prepared to bury what would have become her coffin. She was wedged between her parents, both dead.

Millions of Weibo “tweets” had already been aflame with news and views of the accident. The sheer number of text messages proved to expose the crisis of confidence citizens had in its leadership and the direction in which the country was developing. With Twitter blocked in China, Weibo had become the default microblogger of choice for hundreds of millions of Internet users in the country. During a prime-time slot Central China Television (CCTV) broadcaster Qiu Qiming echoed Internet calls for accountability from central government authorities:

“If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed?” he said. “. . . Can the roads we travel on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel in safe trains? And if and when a major accident does happen, can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? China, please slow down. If you’re too fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind.”

The short message encapsulated the times in which 1.5 billion people—including my family and I—were living in the country: Economic growth and modernization had morphed dangerously out of control. The event itself and the government’s response to public excoriation were truly historic.

Conventional media grilled the CCP and the Ministry of Railways. Traditional Party mouthpieces like the national television network CCTV, the China Daily and the sensationalist Global Times roasted the highest levels of authority. Weibo and blogs authored by millions of Chinese Internet users continued the flow of vitriol for weeks. Beijing then did the most unexpected thing.

It did not shut down the media channels. Any of them.

Some high-profile media commentators were censured, according to sources, while others were suspended or may have been fired. However, none of the popular, unofficial Internet sources of news suffered wholesale censorship. The armies of censors at first tried to filter out messages with keywords deemed inflammatory, and, initially, some blogs were pulled down. The central government, however, did not block the most sensitive parts of the incident from the public. Apparatchiks understood that they would have to act quickly, decisively, to keep the populace from massing against them.

Another completely unexpected—and, for the central government, a highly embarrassing—move was to slow trains with a top design speed of 350 km/h to 300 km/h. Trains designed to run up to 250 km/h were not allowed to exceed 200 km/h. The CSR Corporation Ltd., makers of the trains for the highly publicized Beijing-Shanghai line, recalled over 40 coaches built specifically for the line, the crown jewel of China’s high-speed rail. Authorities reverted to the older equipment of the traditional overnight train between Beijing and Shanghai, which resulted in a dramatic change in travel time from 6 hours by high-speed rail to 11 hours with conventional rolling stock and locomotives. In addition, all newly built high-speed rail lines were to undergo a thorough inspection. By the end of 2011, all new construction on the rail lines had come to an abrupt stop. Innovation with Chinese characteristics—what the central government called “indigenous innovation”—was in for a serious review.

• • •

In 2006 Beijing implemented a national initiative that required foreign companies with proprietary technologies to share those technologies with local partners. The policy applied for the most part to industries the country deemed strategic to its economic preeminence, like information technology, aerospace, biotechnology, and cleantech. Joint cooperation meant Chinese interests having access to product blueprints, in some product categories. The Chinese would then localize the technology to meet conditions within the country’s borders, and patent the remake in international markets as China’s own. Beijing called the policy “indigenous innovation.” The innovation policy failed, however, in the critical signaling technology the Japanese had passed over to the Chinese to build the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line.

The Japanese had placed their technology in a black box the Chinese were unable to reverse-engineer. Their best railway technicians set about replicating the contents of the black box without fully understanding the design. The misunderstanding in how signaling works within a Japanese context and how it needed to be adjusted in Mainland China was a major contributor in the Hangzhou-Wenzhou train crash. The ripple effects of the innovation misstep touched on every major aspect of modern Chinese society’s vision of the perfect future its leadership had been molding for its people and promoting to the world. China Fast Forward explores the critical juncture at which the society then found its development and the choices remaining open to it in the near future.

China Fast Forward is a survey of some the many technologies, industries, and innovations China is adopting from the West, modifying in many instances, and applying to build and consolidate its position in the world as a global leader. To be a superpower in modern terms implies the highest level of social development any country can attain in an epoch, as well as the greatest capacity the nation has to sustain the lofty heights it has attained. China Fast Forward explores the nature of innovation in the manner in which China understands it and the nation’s interpretation of the mechanism by which discoveries are made and integrated with the world in which we live. The book also explores whether the society’s innovation priorities will assist it—and the rest of the world—in overcoming the energy, resource, and environmental constraints against which it is already pressing.

In 2011 China’s central planners understood they had reached a tipping point in the nation’s economic and social development. The quality of the innovations central planners intended for mass consumption was becoming more important to citizens than the quantity and the speed with which products were offered up for consumption. This included infrastructure projects. Whether high-speed trains, bridges, roadways, residential property, or a plethora of other government and commercial interests, Chinese were beginning to fatigue under the constant stress of not knowing whether the cars they drove in, the airplanes they flew in, or the trains in which they commuted were going to disintegrate mid-operation. For instance, six months before the bullet train accident, central authorities had placed a moratorium on any further development of wind power farms. Half the wind turbines manufacturers had built were off-line and the half that were online were having constant maintenance problems. Three months later, the nuclear power plant disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi facility in north Japan forced Chinese central authorities to place a moratorium on the approval of new projects. Nuclear power promoters within the government had slated 77 new nuclear power plants to be built in the nine years leading up to 2020—the most any country in history had attempted to build in such a short time span. Before the end of 2011 the central government had announced it would be paring down the number of nuclear power projects that would actually be built and that the new facilities would use safer third-generation technology, imported from Europe. Re-innovation, the central authorities were beginning to admit, had its limitations in building a modern, digital society.

The public shortcomings of re-innovation impacted the credibility of Chinese scientists and researchers filing the second most patents in the world by 2010. Critics charged that if the patents were simply adaptations and localizations of technologies copied from designs implemented elsewhere, were those real innovations? And what was so earth-shattering about them? Ultimately, did answers to these questions matter to us in the West, or to other developing nations?

The answers, it seemed, did matter to any nation that had been or was building its society on outmoded paradigms of the Industrial Revolution. How China in particular adapted imported technologies to develop its high-speed rail system and other critical projects reflected on China’s understanding of the nature of innovation. The integrity of its undertakings illustrated how it was spending its creative capital to meet the challenges of modernization, overpopulation, and aging demographics.

For instance, just over half the country’s population lived in cities by 2012. By 2020 China’s urban centers will support a migration of 100 million people from rural to urban life. By 2025 China will have more than 220 cities with populations greater than 1 million. The country will have paved 5 billion square meters of road and built 5 million buildings, including 50,000 high rises.1

The leadership will have to find jobs for its newly urbanized. It will have to ensure ample water and food for the new city dwellers. It will also have to provide constant supplies of electricity, quadruple the amount their rural cousins require. Governments at every level will also be responsible for moderating air, water, and land pollution to ensure the spaces are livable for residents. The high-speed rail was one of the country’s most important components in reducing its carbon emissions. Still, bullet trains require their electricity to come from somewhere. The fount of energy will likely be one of the thousands of coal-burning power stations pock-marking the Chinese landscape. The ways, means, and will with which the country ameliorates its dependency on fossil fuels—especially coal—matters greatly. Climate change will dramatically affect the degree to which China will be able to build and sustain a post-industrial society—its digital dynasty. However, just as China fully realizes its vision mid-century it will meet a “hard ceiling” of social development similar to what it has hit several times before in its long history. The Industrial Revolution paradigms upon which it has careened into modernity have exposed resource, environmental, and energy constraints on a global scale. Modernization has created new problems and conditions the country must resolve to maintain living standards.

Ian Morris, in his thought-provoking book Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, defines social development as a society’s ability to get things done, to shape its physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to its own end. Morris relates four essential measures of social development: energy capture, urbanism, information processing, and a society’s capacity to make war. Energy capture is a society’s ability to harness energy, as in burning coal to heat water into motive steam that drives turbines. Urbanism represents a society’s ability to organize its resources—like energy, people, and matériel—into rational drivers that facilitate the society’s efforts to achieve its goals. Information processing reflects the sophistication, the rapidity with which information travels, and the capture rates of the transmissions. The Internet has proven a much more effective means of communications than the telegraph, for instance. And a society’s wherewithal to make war on others or to defend itself is critical in some instances to preservation of the society. The hard ceiling, as Morris defines it, is the point in a society’s lifetime when it can no longer sustain current levels of complexity in its society. Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, places the base of the pyramid of social measures squarely on the ability of a society to find and integrate ever-greater sources of energy; or, even more effective, energy sources with greater bangs for the buck than those previously used.

China and the Western core—today’s European Union—have hit their hard ceilings three other times in history, almost in synchrony, with equally disheartening results: in the 1st century CE (Common Era), when the Han Dynasty and Roman Empire disintegrated; in the 13th century with the Mongol invasions and black plague that brought the Song Dynasty and medieval Europe low; and then again in the 17th century, when the populations in both Eastern and Western cores doubled in size in a matter of decades and adequately feeding, clothing, and housing citizens became a very real concern for the governments of both regions. The Europeans, on the other hand, realized in the 17th century that technology had cleared an avenue to a new way of negotiating with the limitations of social development.

The philosophical antecedents of the Industrial Revolution can be found in the thought of Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, scientist, and statesman who looked to the mechanical nature of the clock rather than the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks. In France, Rene Descartes, another philosopher and a mathematician, wrote, “It is not less natural for a clock, made of the requisite number of wheels, to indicate the hours, than for a tree which has sprung from this or that seed, to produce a particular fruit.” Bacon and Descartes and other thinkers intuitively understood that Europe, together with the colonies in the New World, could transform the cycles of war, famine, and pestilence that characterized Western history for millennia.

The Chinese core, however, cloistered from influences from the West, allowed the Industrial Revolution to pass it by in favor of reviving the ancient Chinese classics to consolidate the political power of its new foreign rulers, the Manchus. Chinese society fell into ruin and chaos 200 years later, in the 1800s. Morris called the dynamics behind the rise and fall and rise again of societies “The Paradox of Development.” He writes, “rising social development generates the very forces that undermine further social development.” Or, as Albert Einstein so plainly put it, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

• • •

I open China Fast Forward with a chapter on the nature of modern Chinese scientific research, and the ways in which the nation is going about innovation in industry to frame the ensuing discussion. Chapter 2 discusses the intersection between government and business in Chinese cyberspace as domestic Internet companies struggle to be free of the ideology that dictates the boundaries of innovation. Chapter 3 conveys my exploration of an aspect of the services sector that is dependent on digital technologies and that the central government considers vital to the country’s continued growth: services outsourcing. Chapter 4 details how China is developing heavy industries to pull the country up the value-chain of sophisticated export products. Chapter 5 investigates the “soft” innovations China and its corporations need to make to re-image themselves in the eyes of the world and become truly incomparable international brands. Chapters 6 through 9 reflect my belief that energy generation and mobilization and the sector’s relationship with the environment are fundamental to the society’s viability in the long run. The last chapter addresses perhaps the most important innovation China must undertake to remain a viable modern society. It is incumbent on its leadership to create a safe and supportive context for the assembly of individuals with social interests that lie beyond the solely commercial and political. Charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eldercare will become increasingly important in China’s future. By 2050 about 30 percent of the population will be over the age of 60, while drought, climate change, and energy constraints will force open a floodgate of rural refugees into the cities.

A China at the leading edge of history is meeting global challenges ahead of most countries. Its huge population, its dearth of energy and mineral resources, and its concentrated pollution issues are mobilizing the country for dramatic change. The approach the country takes to resolve these issues and the level of success it attains in building a sustainable society will hold important lessons for all of us, no matter where we live on this fast-shrinking planet.