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“We are in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” Biden said on April 28th. “We are at a great inflection point in history. We have to do more than just build back better. … We have to compete more strenuously.”
The question we are examining today is what does “compete more strenuously mean.” I’ll be identifying four distinct fields in which heightened competition is likely to come to the fore but first some context and disclaimers.
The first point to note is that, in President Biden’s own words, some partial answers are already clear. Biden has made clear that he sees this 21st century competition as one between the US and its democratic allies on the one side versus Xi, Putin and other autocratic leaders on the other side. in other words, the heart of the competition is democracy versus autocracy. What Biden has also made clear involves timing, that the competition will not be joined in earnest until the U.S. has emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and largely revitalized the performance of the U.S. domestic economy.
Two caveats are also in order. The analysis provided below is strictly my own. The Biden administration – under Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the President and coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council — is currently directing an assessment under which cabinet-level departments and some agencies are re-viewing their policies and procedures as they relate to China. These departments and agencies will be reporting their findings to the White House later this year at which point Kurt Campell, his senior director for China Laura Rosenberger, and their staff will be synthesizing these inputs and articulating an updated “whole of government” policy towards China. (This process is consistent with the ‘get our house in order now’ before focusing on generational competition with China, as referenced above.) Clear answers to the question we’re examining today likely won’t be rolled out by the Administration until that process is complete.
In the meantime, the single best open-source for a quasi-authoritative readout of Biden’s thinking on what heightened US- China technology competition will look like may be the Penn Biden Center. While I am affiliated with Fox Leadership International under the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn, I want to make clear that this blog post does not draw on any information from that source. This is my analysis and I bear sole responsibility for any deficiencies.
So, on to the substance …
At the broadest level, the U.S. needs to up its game in four areas of traditional strength to respond more effectively to the 21st century tech challenge from China:
Field 1: Industry Sector Focus
NASA’s manned mission to the moon and DARPA’s role in the creation of the internet are the most storied examples of U.S. Government success in mid-wiving new high technology industries. What has changed since those early post-war successes is the subsequently accelerated pace of technology innovation and development in the Fourth Industrial Age. In fields as diverse as semiconductor design and fabrication, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence and robotics, quantum computing, EV batteries and biotechnology, U.S. government policy is currently nowhere near as focused in positioning its support role as is China. What is called for is not a return to 20th century “industrial policy” (and its poor record of picking company-level winners and losers) but a new, 21st century approach to policy support to better prepare eco-system support for the emergence of entire new industries.
Field 2: Funding for Innovation & Regulation of Foreign Acquisitions
Despite the recent trend-line of falling investment in basic research in the U.S. and increasing levels of basic research investment in China, the fact remains that China is still no match for the U.S. in terms of the breadth, depth and quality of its basic research or of the commercial potential of the developments it spins off. This is readily apparent in cutting-edge fields like advanced semiconductor design and gene therapy. In these fields, China can’t put a home-grown team onto the field but instead tries to snap up foreign talent and fledgling foreign companies in hit-or-miss hopes of leveraging that into a domestic breakthrough. Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) and other related government entities need more focus on the dynamics underpinning tomorrow’s industries and less on yesterday’s. Likewise, less silo-ing between basic research and commercial development is urgently needed.
Level 3: Rule of Law
Perhaps no societal field offers greater contrast between the U.S. and China than the field of law and legal practice. The U.S. system of case law based on precedent stretches back to the time of the Saxon Kings of England (with very occasional admixtures from the Roman system of law more common to Continental Europe). As enshrined in the U.S. constitution, ours is the rule of law, not the rule of men (or women). While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has borrowed legal ‘parts’ from a wide variety of sources since 1949, the legal system it has assembled from those parts is principally designed to serve the interests of the governing party rather than to protect inherent rights of its citizens or its private companies. It is rule by law, rather than rule of law, as was vividly demonstrated with the imposition of the new security law in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020. Despite the slowness and costs associated with it, the U.S. legal system provides a level of predictability and protection for investors and businesspeople which can’t be matched in China. We can expect to see the Biden Administration act to shore up the foundations of this legal system following the strains put on it by the previous administration.
Level 4: Wellsprings of Economic Vitality
Two of the deepest sources of support and revitalization for technology innovation in the U.S. are immigration and our capital markets. Immigration brings a steady stream not only of young and eager workers but also on occasion transformational business talent such as Sergey Brin and Elon Musk. Our capital markets spread risk over a broad pool of investors and investment vehicles, incentivize iconoclastic thinking and efficiently channel capital to the points of likely greatest return. While China has through its tax policy been impressively building an investment-led structure for its markets, the efficiency and speed of execution of the U.S. capital markets can’t be matched in China. In broad view, China currently tries to leverage its centralized leadership and ‘command economy’ model to try to neutralize this U.S. advantage as well as hoping to ride the momentum from its high-growth domestic macro-development over the last four decades (and the internationalization of that development model over the last ten years). How China fares in field of competition in the years ahead as it emerges from its fast-growth phase of development and collides with a dire demographic imbalance will be one of the more consequential questions of the early 21st century.
Editorial Note: Upcoming posts in the TEA Collaboratives T-series on technology topics will pick up and expand on some of the topics identified above. Our focus in this Technology Competition sub-series will mostly fall under the industry and innovation topics identified above but we will also have occasional invited guest experts to delve more deeplly the legal and capital markets topics. Also, it’s important to note explicitly that the viewpoint expressed in this post and other future posts in the series are obviously a perspective from the U.S.-side. We will present the ‘emic’ view (as seen through the eyes of Chinese government planners and officials) separately through our A-series (Ambitions) posts which appear on Fridays.
As a final note, the Technology Competition sub-series posts introduced in today’s post will alternate on Mondays with our TECH-tonics sub-series posts (which focuses exclusively on issues associated with the micro-electronic supply chain fault-line between the U.S. and China passing through Taiwan). In any given month, we’ll be producing in alternating fashion two posts in the TECHtonics and and two poss in the Tech Competition sub-series.
China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP) has been truckin’ along the main street of U.S.-China clean energy cooperation since 2011. As seen through our eyes, it sure has been a trip. Here’s a brief history of the long, strange journey …
Timed well to the moment we’re in right now, the peer-reviewed science journal Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy has published this month an overview article recapping CPGP’s 10-year journey and peering forward at the road ahead. You can read the article here and feel free to comment below.
Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately, it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been…
Volume 2, Number 4 in Global TECHtonics: U.S./China Fault-line series
The weekend’s big development in the technology arena is Beijing’s eleventh-hour move to alter the timing and trajectory of the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operation.
We touched on the Trump Administration’s August moves against TikTok’s parent Bytedance in the U.S./China De-Coupling: 4 Levels of Risk post two weeks ago. On August 6th, President Trump signed two executive orders which started a 45-day time-clock involving two Chinese companies with hugely popular social media apps – ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Tencent (owner of WeChat). According to those orders, U.S. citizens and businesses would be barred, once the 45-day period expired, from any transaction involving the company and/or its products. On August 14th, the Trump Administration modified the order as far as it affected TikTok by putting a new order in place, giving TikTok 90-days within which to complete the divestiture of its U.S. operation to an approved U.S. corporate buyer.
The widely-presumed reason for this change being made so shortly after the announcement of the original order is that U.S. potential buyers interested in acquiring the U.S. operations of TikTok had pitched their interest to the White House. It is not surprising that U.S. potential acquirers would be focused on TikTok and not WeChat. The number of TikTok users in the U.S. is estimated at 80 million in comparison with 19 million for WeChat. Its growth rate in global markets is far faster and, critically, its algorithms have nearly ubiquitous applicability whereas WeChat algorithms are more geared to Chinese user behavior and are so less replicable in other world markets.
Two groups of interested buyers have emerged publicly since the August 14th announcement:
- Microsoft/Walmart: As Instagram and other social networks edge into offering shopping features, Microsoft and Walmart are looking to establish themselves at the strategic center of this opportunity with one bold acquisition move. Put simply, Walmart would provide the e-commerce component for TikTok while Microsoft would manage the crucial cloud-computing infrastructure. The deal offers competitive advantages to both firms – Walmart would become better positioned to compete with Amazon and Microsoft would gain experience with an innovative and cutting-edge set of algorithms and data-sets.
- Oracle: According to analysis by the New York Times business reporter Mike Isaac, “Oracle could use TikTok’s data about social interactions to benefit its cloud, data and advertising businesses.” Also, like Microsoft and Walmart, Oracle is interested in the opportunity the deal would afford “to offer customers a hyper-personalized experience in both content and commerce.”
Going into the weekend, the expectation was high that Bytedance’s preferred acquisition partner would become known and that negotiations would shift to a new phase of negotiation with only that chosen partner.
So, what was the development over the weekend which changed the trajectory and pace of this deal? The Chinese government announced late in the day on Friday that any sale of Bytedance’s assets would be subject to a brand-new set of restrictions affecting artificial intelligence exports. As reported in still-developing coverage in the Wall Street Journal, “the new Chinese restrictions highlight the extent to which TikTok, a breakout social-media hit—especially with younger U.S. users—has been thrust into a geopolitical contest between the U.S. and China over the future of global technology.”
I’ll limit my commentary on this development to three main points – a historical observation, a key point having to do with the present-day competition in advanced technologies between the U.S. and China, and my personal handicapping of where this deal is likely to go in the weeks ahead.
Historical Antecedent: The U.S.-Japan Trade War
While observers sometimes invoke the U.S.-Japan Trade War as a template for understanding our current tensions with China, the contrasts between the two are probably more instructive than the similarities. A future post will return to the broad comparison. For our purposes here, I will single out one important point of contrast. The U.S.-Japan Trade war became incandescently hot as a political issue in the lead-up to the 1992 U.S. Presidential election. But while that was happening, commercial developments on the ground were already in motion to begin lowering the heat. The industry sector in which the grass-roots transformation took root and started having great effect was the automotive sector. The seed for that bottom-up transformation was the fact that, post-war, Japan had developed intellectual property in their domestic market that made them more competitive than the U.S. industry in a number of vital areas of automotive manufacturing (e.g., inventory management, quality control, customer-based innovation, etc). Led by Toyota, the Japanese and U.S. industries started reaching an accommodation even before politicians in the U.S. turned up the volume on their anti-Japan megaphones. Japan would license out its intellectual property and bring its production closer to its customers in the U.S. by building factories and supplier networks in the U.S. In return, American companies would gain access to know-how in areas where its competitiveness was lagging and also gained greater access to the restricted Japanese market. At a political level, investments in new state-of-the-art production facilities in the non-unionized south brought jobs into key congressional districts. Of equal importance, auto workers, their families and their communities started having the experience of working alongside Japanese managers on U.S. soil. In the process, real-world people-to-people experiences built on collaboration replaced the one-dimensional caricatures being amplified by politicians and the media.
The Chinese have studied this experience whereby Japan lessened the political tension of the U.S.-Japan Trade War while, simultaneously expanding access to the lucrative U.S. market and affluent U.S. consumers. For various reasons, they have not been as successful in applying the model. We’ll examine the broader set of reasons in a future post but, for present purposes, one salient reason is that China, generally speaking, has not developed the portfolio of intellectual property focused in high-value industries (like, for Japan, automotive and consumer electronics) and highly sought after by U.S. companies. Except, that is, until now as China emerges with competitiveness in advanced technology fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.
Looking at Both Sides Now:
The U.S. innovation ecosystem represented by Silicon Valley is, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, peerless in many important respects – depth of talent and experience, access to capital, connectivity to leading universities, basic research capability and innovation mindedness. In three respects, however, emerging tech competitors in China enjoy advantages which U.S. firms can’t match. First, China has been for years the biggest and fastest growing market in the world and U.S. companies can’t afford to cede that base of users entirely to their Chinese competition to monopolize. However, the ability of U.S. firms to access those consumers is highly constrained by a whole raft of protections – many non-WTO compliant and others not yet covered by WTO ground-rules — by which the Chinese government limits foreign access to its home market and by which it supports its home-grown champion companies. Second, China may enjoy a tactical advantage through its laser-focus on market applications (as opposed to research and academically-based innovation). Third, AI firms in China definitely enjoy a leg-up in algorithm development because they have direct access to the world’s largest user-base for smart phones and are less constrained by privacy protections for those users. These latter two advantages for Chinese tech firms are persuasively presented by the former President of Google China, Kaifu Lee (a Taiwanese national whose computer science PhD thesis at Carnegie Mellon gave birth to the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system) in his book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order. In Lee’s view, “the United States may have been a first mover in AI but that advantage will not last forever. The AI era will reward the quantity of solid AI engineers over the quality of elite researchers. Strength will come from an army of well-trained engineers and entrepreneurs, and China is training just such an army.”
So, stepping back, there is now for the first time since normalization of U.S.-China relations a strategically-important (emerging) industry where Chinese firms hold important competititve advantages over the U.S. Unlike democratic Japan, this high-stakes competition is associated with a Communist regime with all that that entails for public attitudes in the U.S. And there is little in the of way local ties-that-bind being built quickly and effectively on a people-to-people basis. Nothing that can match the stabilizing experience with Japan investment into the U.S. in the 1990s. Together, these three factors go a long way to illuminating the huge pressures that have been building up under the U.S./China technology faultline on both sides of the U.S. political aisle.
Where’s The TikTok Deal Likely to Go?
Despite the fact that practically nothing is known yet about the details of the PRC government restrictions announced on Friday, two things can be safely said. First, the fact that the PRC government is invoking national security as a basis for governing the commercial activities of its leading artificial intelligence firms is hardly surprising. The competition between the U.S. and China is, for reasons just examined, acute. The U.S. and other countries routinely monitor and manage international commercial activity for their technologically-advanced products and services, especially those that are ‘dual-use’ in both commercial and military applications. The second point is that the timing of the announcement tends to be viewed in the U.S. as so transparently tied to the on-going negotiation involving TikTok that it will be viewed more as a political beanball, than a fair pitch. This despite the fact, as pointed out by an astute comment (see below), that these new regulations had been proposed prior to Trump’s August 6th announcement and were in a public comment process.
The Chinese government action raises the prospect that key algorithms and other vital data – everything that makes TikTok tick — may be stripped out of the sale by its Chinese parent corporation as a new requirement of Chinese law. That result would fundamentally change the value proposition for both the Microsoft/Walmart and Oracle bidding teams. It’s like the difference in value between a top-of-the-line computer and that same computer with all its electronics removed. At the very least, the PRC government action will force all parties to slow the pace of their negotiations and delay the deal being sealed until there’s greater clarity about what will ultimately be allowed.
With Friday’s move, it’s likely that the Chinese government will be satisfied with slowing the deal and changing the trajectory of its fall-out for global technology competition. Scuppering the deal entirely would risk dramatically escalating the issue with Trump and his Administration. That would go against China’s temporary strategy of muted response to the Trump Administration’s recent, pre-election flurry of jabs. The idea in Zhongnanhai in the run-up to November 3rd is to give its wolf-warriors and nationalistic netizens enough to appease their appetites but not enough to risk fanning Washington-Beijing flames out of control.
So, with the clock ticking down to 64 days before the U.S. election and with 78 days before the Trump Executive Order 90-day deadline expires on November 12th, the endgame of this global chess match is now ruled by the time-clock.
TikTok, TikTok, TikTok …
“Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change, and almost as many say the problem is already affecting their community in some way” according to a Pew Research Center survey released on June 23rd this year.
While Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply over the question of whether human activity is contributing “a great deal” (72% Democrats vs 22% Republicans) or only “some” (22% Democrat vs 43% Republicans) to climate change, strong majorities of both parties recognize the human contribution and want the government to do more about it.
The story of this post goes back some twelve years. It’s a story of how bipartisanship and cooperative outreach can lead change. It shows what can be achieved when we focus, with a grounding in science, on the common good. We’re not doing that successfully now with COVID-19. We’re not doing it successfully now with climate change either But it’s within reach to do better.
As the second term of the George W. Bush Administration was winding down, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson sensed drift in the U.S.-China relationship. An avid birder and a passionate outdoorsman, Paulson found himself drawn to the environment as a possible new basis for cooperative engagement with China. If sufficient trust could be generated between the U.S. and China – especially among the career administrators responsible for climate policy in both countries – the quarter-century logjam that had impeded global action on climate change might free up.
What was that logjam? Ever since the mid-1970s, when the United Nations had first identified climate change as a long-term economic and political threat to the community of nations, the United States and China had never seen the issue eye-to-eye. The U.S., acting as the de facto leader of the developed nations, wanted joint action with the developing nations but didn’t want the developed nations to be forced to shoulder most costs. China, as de facto leader of the developing nations, wanted joint action but insisted the developing nations should foot most of the bill. Their argument, somewhat disingenuous but appealing in its simplicity, used a restaurant tab as an analogy. Why should developing nations, who had come late to the industrial revolution party, be splitting the bill for all the courses when they had only participated in the post-WWII dessert course? (The ploy buried in this argument is, of course, that the rates of consumption and carbon output of the post-WWII phase of industrial development outstripped significantly the previous century on a cumulative basis and the developing nations were on course to grow their consumption and carbon output in coming decades while developing nations were moderating theirs). In any case, this divergence of approach led directly to the breakdown of the Kyoto Protocol in 1999 (and also to the less consequential but unseemly debacle between President Obama and the Chinese delegation at the COP20 (20th UN Conference of Parties) meeting in Copenhagen in 2009).
So against this background, Secretary Paulson traveled to Beijing for discussions with his Chinese government counterparts about a new framework for coordination on global economic issues, resolution of trade disputes and strategic cooperation to mitigate climate change. While on that trip, Paulson traveled with his China-hand Deputy Chief of Staff, Taiya Smith, to Lake Qinghai to see first-hand the condition of that world-heritage lake and its wetland bird habitat. At the water’s edge, Paulson picked up some beverage cans and plastic bottles discarded there by fishermen and tourists. The Chinese officials traveling with him were surprised and impressed to see a Cabinet-level U.S. official stoop, literally, to help clear a Chinese lake of trash. In that moment, a ten-year run of strategic cooperation on clean energy and the environment between the U.S. and China was launched.
Over the past two academic years, I taught a masters level course for the University of Pennsylvania’s International Masters of Public Administration with the official Ten Year Framework (TYF) for U.S.-China Cooperation on Energy and Environment as the focal case-study. I could say a lot about it but, for the purpose of this post, I have only a single point to make.
The TYF is a case-study in the hard work of cooperation. Launched in late 2008 by a Republican administration, handed off post-inauguration to the Obama Administration in early 2009, and then officially signed by President Obama and President Hu Jintao in November 2019, the first four years of the TYF created a “safe place” – beyond the prying eyes of the press and partisan grandstanders — where officials from the U.S. and China could educate each other about what might be possible and what would be perilous to undertake in their respective administrative and political systems. In short, they learned to trust one another to move in a common direction. The result of this four years of hard work was another official public act by President Obama and the new Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in November 11, 2014. The two presidents announced with fanfare that, for the first time in over forty years, the U.S. and China were ready to work together to lead the world towards a climate change agreement. Once that announcement was made between the U.S. and China, all it took was thirteen more months for over 190 other nations to join with the U.S. and China in agreeing to the Paris Accord at the COP21 meeting.
The TYF is a lesson in leadership or, more precisely, co-leadership. But it’s over. What relevance does it have in August 2020? Less than six months into his Presidency, President Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Accord. Now, in the lead-up to the November elections, each day brings a new low in U.S.-China relations. As someone who was serving at the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai before, during and after Tiananmen, I feel able to make the assessment that we are now at a lower point in the U.S.-China relationship than we were even then. The question is where to do we go from here?
That question is valid and complicated where our relationship is deeply fraught – advanced technology and global supply chains, minority rights in Xinjiang, political space for Hong Kong and Taiwan, military build-ups in the East and South China Seas – but the question is much simpler where our national interests are clearly aligned – in leading the world’s transition to lower-carbon energy in order to build resilience and mitigate climate change for the planet. Either the U.S. cedes a mega-industry of the future to China along with leadership of the Paris Accord community of nations or the U.S. steps forward again on the global stage with its unparalleled technology leadership and with renewed political vision. What will this look like? It will look like working with allies and not against them. It will involve not just supporting the planting of a billion trees globally and helping Big Coal capture and sequester carbon emissions underground but marshaling across-the-board governmental support to spur innovation across the entire spectrum of low-carbon solutions. It will require us to re-enter the Paris Accord and re-learn how to work productively with China in that particular arena while holding China to account in the many other arenas where our interests are at loggerheads.
Trump’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord was on June 1, 2017. The framers of the Paris Accord, mindful of political cross-winds that can blow in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, included an Article 28 requirement that a four-year waiting period pass before any country’s withdrawal could be formalized. The date kicking off that waiting period for the U.S. is November 4, 2016, the day on which the Obama Administration secured ratification by Congress of U.S. entry into the Paris Accord. So, U.S. withdrawal cannot under any circumstance become official until the day after the upcoming November 3rd election in the U.S.
So there’s the Sixty-Seven Percent solution. With nearly two-thirds of Americans believing the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change and with the Paris Accord signatories able to be flexible and eager to welcome a Biden-led America back into the Accord, it’s time for a majority to stand up again in unison. For each of our poor souls, for our country, for the community of nations and for the planet.
E pluribus (67%) unum.
By Anum Yoon
Reposted from the Triple Pundit website post on May 2015
This year’s Sustainable Cities Index reported the top 10 sustainable cities of 2015. The Index provided an overview of 50 of the world’s cities and what their performance rankings were in relation to the factors of people, planet and profit – the three pillars of the triple bottom line. Europe dominated the top 10 overall rankings, holding seven of the 10 places. And with good reason: Europe has developed an impressive environmental legislation over the past 40 years. They have continuously demonstrated how improving the environment could drive innovation and job creation, while improving the quality of life for everyone.
But seeing those European cities on the list isn’t what impressed me. I was more fascinated by the fact that the remaining three rankings were held by Asian cities. While no American city made the top 10 list (with Boston holding 15th place), three cities proved that global sustainability is becoming increasingly dependent on the implementation of effective environmental policies in the developed cities of Asia.
Here are the sustainable cities in Asia that were successful in finding a better equilibrium in terms of development and progress:
Seoul: Ranked No. 7
Over the past 60 years, South Korea has grown from a war-torn nation to a major world power, becoming the 13th largest economy in terms GDP. This is quite impressive for a nation with a population of only 50 million. The capital and largest city, Seoul, is the product of this rapid economic growth. With over 25.6 million people living in the metropolitan area, Seoul shares the same problems as other large cities, including detrimental impact on the environment. It seemed the citizens of Seoul faced the choice between an improved quality of life and helping the environment… Or did they?
Forward-thinkers look to the idealized notion of the “ubiquitous city” in order to strive toward becoming a more sustainable city. The key to the ubiquitous city concept is technology. Seoul is a world leader in terms of digital governance and open data. This includes an extensive high-speed Internet network. In a ubiquitous city, the free flow of data allows citizens to understand their impact on the environment, as well as the best steps to take in order to reduce their negative effect. The idea is that, by improving technology infrastructure, urban residents can shape their lifestyles in an eco-friendly manner. An example of this in action is the Personal Travel Assistant system. This system delivers real-time information of the public transportation network. It allows the user to access information on carbon emissions and other green transportation options.
South Korea has taken this idea a step further by initiating a project on a huge scale, with the purpose of building the “smart city” Songdo. This city lies near the Seoul airport and has a future projected population of 2 million. This “city on a hill” has the technology and green space to live up to this moniker. It will successfully sustain an underground system of tubes for disposing of waste, universal broadband, integrated sensor networks, and green buildings to truly make it the “city of the future.”
Songdo may soon become the benchmark that the rest of Seoul will work toward, for achieving both a high quality of living and a sustainable city.
Hong Kong: Ranked No. 8
Hong Kong rose to international prominence in the late 1970s, acting as a trading hub between China and the rest of the world. This led Hong Kong to become one of the world’s financial centers that boasts a high GDP and quality of living. This rapid growth, however, also brought about the age-old problems that go hand in hand with urbanization: pollution and environmental degradation. Hong Kong has thus taken steps to curb these negative effects.
Hong Kong has a Council for Sustainable Development, which operates the Sustainable Development Fund. This fund of $100 million is provided to act as financial support for initiatives that will promote awareness for sustainable development, as well as initiatives that encourage sustainable practices. This promotes the active involvement of the citizenry through nonprofit organizations and educational institutions. Leadership in Hong Kong seems to take the view that individual efforts and policy changes will lead to sustainable growth.
Technology has also played an important role in Hong Kong’s sustainability. Citizens of Hong Kong extensively utilize non-motorized and public transit. The Octopus Smart Card makes it easy for users to pay for public transit as well as parking. The smart card can also be used for grocery stores and vending machines. This convenience and usability makes public transit a more desirable option. There are also laws preventing certain types of personal behavior, such as spitting in public, littering, and consuming food or drinks on any public transportation.
Singapore: Ranked No. 10
Singapore has made tremendous progress since its independence in 1965. Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first prime minister, wanted Singapore to outshine other developed countries in areas of cleanliness and efficient transport systems. Singapore’s famouschewing gum ban is one of the many successful environmentally-friendly initiatives that are enforced through the legal system. You’re even legally required to flush public toilets in Singapore. It’s interesting to note that Hong Kong is one of Singapore’s biggest admirers in terms of imposing bans and penalties on certain types of “rude” behavior.
Singapore also has something called the Sustainable Singapore Blueprint, which outlines a cohesive plan of action for all citizens to follow in order to create a more sustainable city. It targets green and blue spaces, transportation, resource sustainability, air quality, drainage, and community stewardship. Much like Hong Kong and Seoul, Singapore relies on advanced technology and a robust public transportation network.
However, Singapore was able to take on a problem unique to its city — the need to import potable water from Malaysia — and turned it into an economic strength. Singaporean policies supporting innovation to solve this problem lead to over 100 companies developing a profitable niche industry in collecting rainwater and recycling water. Their technologies have spread around the globe.
Singapore not only relies on technology, but also on its own citizens. The Sustainable Singapore Blueprint emphasizes community involvement in conserving resources and preserving green spaces.
The future of urbanization
It seems that these three cities have some significant similarities:
- Robust and convenient public transportation
- Relatively recent economic growth
- Utilization of advanced technology
- High GDP per capita ($30,000+ GDP per capita)
- Space limitations
Space limitations may be the driving force for these advanced Asian cities and their environmentally friendly innovations. Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul are all small areas that have space restrictions, and thus high population densities. Where in other places, people can simply spread out (see Los Angeles), these cities cannot. Singapore is a city-state; Hong Kong was historically bordered by not-so-friendly China; and the Seoul metro area is slowly taking over South Korea, with half of the country’s population, 25 million people, living in the Seoul metro. Everyone feels the need to live in these cities, even when there is a severe lack of space.
With space constraints, pollution gets worse; there is less green space, more litter and a higher demand for resources. This led these three cities to deal with the sustainability issue in similar ways, which all boil down to infrastructure. Since each city has the wealth to deal with the problem, they do, using technology to improve infrastructure. Infrastructure means more communication between citizens, better recycling efforts, better public transit, better waste disposal and better emissions management.
Image credits: 1) Songdo IBD All others via Flickr – M.Bob & Kenny Teo
Anum Yoon is a writer who is passionate about personal finance and sustainability. As a regular contributor to the Presidio Graduate School’s blog, she often looks for ways she can incorporate money management with environmental awareness. You can read her updates on Current on Currency.
The motto of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is ‘knowledge in the public service.’ This publication of mine from September 2012 is made available to the public free of charge here by downloadable PDF.
INTRODUCTION
At the time of my initial appointment to the Wilson Center, it struck me that something was missing from the general discussion in the United States concerning China’s embrace of clean energy and its implications for the United States. Much of what had been written embraced one of two polar positions. It seemed that the U.S.-China relationship in clean energy was either the best avenue for our cooperation or the measuring stick for our final competition. To a casual but concerned reader, the message was confusing. Newspaper “word-bites,” rather than informing discussion, lent anxiety to the existing confusion. The Woodrow Wilson Center provided me time and resources to examine the facts about clean technology (“cleantech”) and China. This was timely. Government agencies, think tanks and trade associations hoping to influence the policy debate began in February 2009 to release a spate of lengthy and in-depth policy reports, many of them technical in nature. We will learn in Chapter One how and why that gusher of information—which has thrown up literally shelf-feet of reports over the past year and a half— suddenly arose. However, for the purposes of this Introduction, it is simply worth noting that these policy tomes, for all that they did serve to provide data-based context to what had previously been “context-free” highly combustible reporting, did not offer much help to an interested non-specialist in making better sense of the main issues. At this “informed” end of the information spectrum, there was now almost too much information spread across too many specialized viewpoints. For a busy entrepreneur, investment manager, business professional, state or local government official, regional economic development analyst, scientific researcher, or engaged student—in fact, for any concerned “global citizen” wanting to understand the issues in a straightforward and streamlined way— it was famine or feast. A super-abundance of highly-specialized information provides not much more help in gaining an efficient grasp of the core issues than scattershot newspaper and media reporting had offered. Sustaining U.S.-China Clean Energy Cooperation 3 This book aims squarely at the “middle ground” of curiosity and interest in this broad topic. At the outset, I would like to be clear about three “operating assumptions” I have built in: Timeframe The three main chapters are concerned with the three-year period from mid-2008 to mid-2011. Except for one digression involving Five Year Plans which covers a 30-year period, this limitation on perspective actually helps bring the main subject matter into better focus. The bulk of the U.S. political effort to engage with China in the clean energy arena took shape during the 2008 Presidential Campaign and was further framed through policy initiatives of the Obama administration. For a new industrial ecosystem like “cleantech” or clean energy, what is relevant is defined by what has most recently happened. It is only in the Conclusion that the time-frame is pulled back to show that some of the dynamics described in preceding chapters are, in fact, related to deeper and more long-standing trends in the overall U.S.-China relationship. Structure As author, I have insisted on an organizational principle for presenting information which puts me at odds with the conventional approach of “Beltway” experts. In Washington, the tendency is to run all relevant information through what I will call the “policy blender” and to present the resulting product as a mix of policy recommendation, policy analysis, and policy refutation. I take a different approach. I believe that the policy process is best served when the three main aspects of business-relevant policy are broken down and viewed separately in their own right. These are: (a) the politics underlying the policy process; (b) the technology innovations which policy initiatives aim to support; and (c) the investment ultimately required to take any technology innovation to scale in the marketplace, thereby driving policy on a long-term and sustainable basis. Rather than jumble these perspectives, I treat them in Merritt t. Cooke 4 separate chapters and try to adopt the relevant “mind-set” of each in presenting material in the respective chapter. This may be nothing more than a reflection of my former training as a cultural anthropologist, but I believe it is useful—within the complex arena of China, the United States, and energy—in revealing underlying dynamics. For this reason, in the U.S. section of the opening chapter on Politics, I will rely heavily on the words of key political actors. Ours is a system where the president needs to persuade the electorate and what is said matters. In the section on Chinese Politics, the approach is different, relying instead on “structural analysis” of the ruling party and its interests. In each case, the attempt is to adopt a perspective particularly suited to its subject matter. Purpose The Woodrow Wilson Center’s motto is “knowledge in the public service.” Woodrow Wilson epitomized the ideal of the “practitioner scholar”—the part-time scholar who devotes some of his or her career to bringing scholarly research into the practical, socially-relevant domains of government or business or non-profit work. This is the spirit with which I have written this book. I am neither a career academic nor a professional policymaker. I have tried to make this book clear and concise, although it involves a complex, and fast-changing topic. Especially for technically inclined readers, I want to acknowledge that no sector domain in the U.S.-China clean energy field can be adequately reduced to a couple of pages. I believe this topic is an important one. If the United States and China find a way to realistically base and sustain their cooperation in clean energy, they will be addressing directly 40 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. And if together they manage to create a replicable model of cooperation, they can indirectly help the world address the remaining 60 percent. At its core, this topic touches everyone—those who care deeply about America’s place in the world, those who are moved by China’s epochal reemergence, those who are environmentally-engaged, and those who are responsible global citizens. Students are a particularly important audience because the tectonic issue described in this book will ultimately be the felt experience of their generation. In short, I hope that this book may be found to present important issues in a balanced way and to offer something useful and readily comprehensible to anyone with enough interest to pick it up.
View the Wilson Center’s Book Launch Event here
The following post comes courtesy of Sinosphere, the China blog for The New York Times. Like a flower poking out of the cracked pavement of a concrete jungle, this is another hopeful sign that ‘The Greening of Asia” is starting to blossom.
Q & A with Author Mark Clifford on “The Greening of Asia”
By Ian Johnson from Sinosphere, May 5, 2015 3:21am
A technician at Yingli Solar checks a solar panel on a production line at the company’s headquarters in Baoding, Hebei Province. Credit Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
After 20 years in Asia as a journalist, Mark Clifford took over as executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council in 2007. His new book, “The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia’s Environmental Emergency,” explores how Asian companies are making strides in providing environmental solutions. China is a special focus because of the country’s huge emissions of carbon, but also because of its potential for innovation.
Mark Clifford.Credit Courtesy of Mark Clifford
In an interview, Mr. Clifford discussed the need to link businesses, governments and nongovernmental organizations to fight climate change:
Q.: How did you get interested in this topic?
A: I joined the Council in 2007 and inherited an almost-finished study on green buildings. That was pretty exotic in Asia back then, and we published a book on it. It got me thinking about the topic.
Q: Your angle is a bit more hopeful than some. Tell us how that came to be.
A: Originally, I thought I’d do a book along the lines of “The East Is Black.” And we do have an emergency here. In China, 1.2 million a year are dying prematurely. People need to know how bad it is, but then I got to thinking that this was pretty obvious. Instead, I thought that there are these much more positive responses underway, and people should know about them. The business community, which takes challenges and solves problems, was involved. So it is unabashedly a glass-half-full book, but that’s because it’s important to know there’s a way out. We can despair, we can do nothing, or we can work to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Q; Do you see business being the main player in solving the issue?
A: No, it’s part of the solution. There has to be a three-legged stool of government, civil society and business, and each has to bring its strengths to the table. Only governments have the power to set rules — the laws and regulations, of course, but also the prices in the forms of taxes and subsidies as well as facilitating infrastructure developments. Media and NGOs make sure that business and government are doing what they promise.
Q: What was most surprising is how many companies are doing this in one form or another.
A: Yes, in the book I profile more than a dozen companies at length but also have an appendix of more than 50 companies that are involved with a variety of environmental initiatives. It was surprising to me what’s going on at the corporate level, but they’re doing things for good business reasons. Some are for the P.R. effect, but most look at it as necessary for survival.
Q: You focused one chapter on Hong Kong’s CLP Holdings, the electric power company.
A: Their work really sparked this project. In 2007, the then-chief executive, Andrew Brandler, announced that by mid-century, they would cut the carbon intensity of their electricity production by 75 percent. This pledge by one of Asia’s biggest private utilities — mostly coal-fired power plants — to effectively decarbonize by mid-century is unparalleled globally. I think this stems from the Kadoorie family, which owns a major stake in CLP. Michael Kadoorie challenges his top management to look at 50-year horizons. They do this for good reasons. They’re traditionally a coal-burning utility, but they think that this isn’t a good business model in 50 years.
Other companies think that water is underpriced, and in the future, it will be more realistically priced. Carbon also is underpriced, and other companies want to be ready for when it’s changed. But not all companies have long-term visions.To reach them, you need the other two legs of the stool. You need good, strong government policy, and you need NGOs to hold people accountable.
Q: What countries have had good policies?
A: Singapore has done an exemplary job. They decided very early on that water is of existential threat to the nation. So they have taken very firm policies, and it gives companies a form of certainty about costs.Not every country has the capacity that Singapore’s administration has, and it’s a small place with a forward-thinking government. It’s much harder in big countries like China and India, which are more fragmented.
Q: You have a lot on China.
A: The good news is we have good policies coming down from the top levels of the Chinese government. Where China continues to struggle is the implementation at the ground level. There’s not always enforcement, and there’s no civil society to act as a check. The time when China decides that the environment and energy issues are as much of a threat as the color revolutions were, or the Hong Kong protests were last year, that’s when we’ll know we have serious progress. We’ve seen with Chai Jing [whose popular documentary film on the environment, “Under the Dome,” was banned] that civil society is muted.
Q: We read a lot about air pollution, but you also think that water is crucial.
A: Increasingly, water is a hard-stop issue. Air pollution is horrible, but most people affected by it are still living. But no one can live without water. I don’t know what people will do when the water stops. In China, projects like the South-North Water Diversion Project just delay the day of reckoning. What concerns me is that even most otherwise far-sighted governments are not facing up to the challenges. For example, what do you do if you’re a municipal official, and you have an industry, say semi-conductors, which uses a lot of water? What do you do when you have to make a choice: water for the factory or the town? These are the kinds of choices that aren’t going to happen today or tomorrow, but governments will face this.
Q: And yet there are signs of hope in China.
A: China is about to overtake Germany as having the largest amount of installed solar power capability. It also has large wind turbine facilities. All of this is important because China burns half the world’s coal and accounts for 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. So to fix China, we need to cut coal use. Coal is supposed to peak in 2030, but it could happen a lot faster. So these are huge challenges, but China is potentially further ahead than many people realize.
______Assessing China / The TEA Collaborative______ 