Chinese infrastructure efficiency hits me as I arrived at Shanghai’s Pudong airport. The BA flight was over an hour late, so I had 20 minutes to get through quarantine and immigration, to change terminal, check in, go through security and find the right gate. At Heathrow this would have taken two hours minimum. The officials were helpful, the system worked, the new China.
It took me back to my first visit to China in 1979. Just three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, I found myself the secretary of an agricultural trade delegation. To get to China we went via Anchorage and Tokyo in a journey taking over 36 hours. The chaos remained; it was a society and an economy reeling from a collective loss of reality. Officialdom was everywhere and paramount. I did the classic thing of leaving my wash-bag in Beijing and being given it back by the police in Nanjing. I had one heart-breaking talk with the director of a scientific institute, a learned but broken man, recently released from hard labour in the north. In Shanghai, I broke away from my minders, wandered the city and ended up on the Bund, mobbed by a crowd, not selling fake Montblanc pens as now, but desperate to talk to a foreigner.
This time, I am doing a tour of five cities. Their combined population is more than the UK’s! Three of them are twinned with a UK city (including Leicester, Liverpool and Coventry) The municipality of Chongqing, my first post of call, claims a population of 32 million, half of the whole of the UK! The statistics in China boggle the imagination. Their “Five Chongqings” campaign shows the power of a confident city or nation, setting a target, an ideal and then going for it. The Five targets are for safety, forests, health, liveability and smooth traffic. That is a good description of what we all want.
The world is also smaller. This morning still in the UK I played an early golf match (thank you, since you asked, I did manage a winning 4 foot putt on the 18th green), got a car to the airport at noon and was airborne by 2pm. After four long-haul trips in 6 weeks, the body has forgotten what normality feels like.
And what strikes me most is how global brands, images, language and taste are now becoming. Business processes, building designs, infrastructure techniques are universal. And of course, it is global trade and investment which acts. Take Crystal Digital. They did its stunning sign digital imagery at the Beijing Olympics. Now they are going to do the same for the London Olympics. Seeing China Eastern planes painted with the Shanghai Expo logos, looking like a branded budget airline anywhere in the world, was another example.
The Chinese now have the energy and self-belief that the British had in the mid-nineteenth century and the Americans had in the mid-twentieth. Great nations used to express their superiority by conquest, exploration, trade and art. Now trade, with international politics is pre-eminent. We all know China’s potential. But how will it respond to global responsibility, global competition and the perils of instability? Back in 1979, it looked inward and backward, guided by a shifting dogma, now it is global and reaching out. I vote for its airport infrastructure anyway.