Attending Hong Kong’s Belt & Road Forum last month I picked up the new “Infrastructure Innovation made in China 2025” flavor set out by Beijing for the next decade! So let me define Innovation as doing things in a way delivering an additional added value to society, otherwise it doesn’t deserve the qualification of Innovation. But truly innovation is something that can only be envisioned by people having the personal freedom to autonomously take decisions on what to work on next in their personal responsibility. And Innovation requires time horizons going beyond ordinary terms of governance in the public domain. By the end of the day Innovation is mostly an entrepreneurial challenge! So how will it work in China for the next decade?
Over the last five years I observed Climate Change mitigation similarly to the Belt & Road initiative to be driven by China’s National Security agenda. At least I had the honor of meeting some figure heads behind the scenes. However, all coming from political backgrounds but of unquestionable public responsibility for a progress beneficial to people in the first place. From my Western perspective I see any employer beyond a few dozens of people working for him, to be a public figure head who should feel socially responsible for a positive development of our society. In China or any other country of high SOEs ratio among the POEs it may have been being quite complex to company leaders to live open-minded Corporate Social Responsibility beyond their own companies’ limits. In Climate Change Mitigation however even current Chinese government expects all its economic enterprise leaders, mayors and regional governors to unprecedentedly share ideas and collaborate for cooperative achievements. Unfortunately the West dissipated its energies on picking up many short term tokenisms sold as big solutions. Although quite often they even trigger adverse effects and represent in almost all cases a misspending of national or bedazzled private wealth.
Europe’s resurrection under the Marshall Plan, initiated by Winston Churchill for the purpose of peace was built on such a helping each other culture. China’s Belt & Road agenda is an endeavor for 3 times the part of global population than Marshall Plan was. It will require to develop a culture of sharing knowledge to co-learn towards co-developing the best superior solutions? Europe’s revival to the currently most sustainably living society after World war 2 was based on joint efforts for learning curves that still can out-learn competitors not building upon shared mindsets. President Xi’s call for “Infrastructure Innovation made in China 2025” gives China a chance to peer into the better solutions Europe’s neglected rooms for improvement due to perceiving the better as an enemy of the propagated good, often tokenisms only.
During my last visit I could grasp the new spirit of China’s Social Responsibility figure heads to be wanting to do something – however not yet knowing exactly what, as the featured image conveys to me. And while thinking about what I could potentially contribute to my multi-year relations into China’s reform networks I was thrilled to learn that at the 19th Peoples’ Party Congress the planning horizon was extended to the 32 years until its 100th anniversary. Further it deemed good to learn that the subject matter of discussions I had in the last couple of years on time pressure limiting project scopes to fit into the first half of President Xi’s second term may disappear thus allowing for the kind of time frames needed for Low-Carbon Eco-civilization Infrastructure Innovation made in China 2025. So the framework seems right, but how will China bridge the entrepreneurial gap between its now enabled reform policy agents, Science & Technology sector and industries needed in implementation? I think it is a field requiring co-learning partnerships comprehensively integrating existing SOE, POE and Start-up governance structures in a new organic way without prejudice of any already existing role models. And in contrary to many Western insinuations, China’s success will not evolve from authoritarianism but from mutually shared common visions of the people involved and pertained finding ways jointly.