External influences: the threat that is China

Most A2 Business students have their sights firmly set on BUSS3 this week, which is very much as it should be. However, next week their attention will turn to the wider world of BUSS4. In planning for that, it looks as if the three-part series of reports about China that Newsnight will be running this week would be very useful, and worth recording or at least picking up on i-player.

A crucial part of The Business Environment in the next decade is going to being the growth of China, and the state of its democracy. In this article which previews the Newsnight reports, Jeremy Paxman ranges over the extraordinary growth of consumerism and way in which wealth is flaunted by the wealthy, the “sea of migrant workers willing to go anywhere for a day’s pay” who are responsible for the speed-frame rate of construction and compares this to Victorian Britain, with “the smog of Charles Dickens’ London finds its counterpart in the murk which envelopes Beijing on windless days and tears at your throat like sandpaper.”

He looks at the work ethic of the Chinese, which, for the moment at least, allows the bulk of the population who remain relatively poor to accept the conspicuous consumption of the rich and growing gap in standard of living, because people seriously want to get rich and they are focused on finding their own opportunities to do so - and questions how long the widening divide will be accepted before revolution is provoked.

And he questions why ‘dozy western governments’ continue to assume that they can sit and watch China’s storming development in the complacent belief that “we can outsource metal-bashing and shirt-stitching because the brains which devise the products nestle inside Western heads.” We have no grounds for supposing that China cannot match, or surpass, us in any of the service or creative industries, let alone in innovation and development of new products and processes.

The article is thought-provoking, and I guess that the news reports will be too. I think that it will be impossible for businesses to manage change within their own organisations without at least some understanding of what they need to compete with, as well as what they could gain from, the transformation of China.