Greatness in Modern China

 

First of all two disclaimers: Life is too short to write about anything but that which inspires us to live, and this translates to me as writing about “Greatness”, so yes this is the bias here; secondly, life probably isn’t even long enough to write about Greatness in all the other countries on Earth, so I’m just going to start with where I am right now: China. Even though I am American I will leave it up to someone else to write about Greatness there (probably a Chinese person, for as the saying goes “远来的和尚会唸经”, i.e. “The outsider sees things more clearly”). Ah yes, and this is going to be pathetically sparse for a while, certainly insufficient to prove the thesis, but bear with it over the years and it will grow to maturity…

I mean wait, holy crap, how am I even remotely qualified to be judging an entire country?! A ten-thousand year-old culture? I don’t even have a degree in the humanities! Never held a public office! How brash, how assuming, blah blah blah. Ok, to this I can only bow my head and yield to the criticisms, they are just and I am nothing. Yet, if we humans let ourselves always be limited by our qualifications, I think the number of great thinkers, inventors, artists, and leaders graciously given to us over the course of history would be less by at least 10-fold. So I too spit at the conventions, beg your pardon, so that we humans may at least make a little headway in this rough cosmos. Let be said what be said, and if there is any merit to it, the reader will perhaps take it and do something with it, and it will all be good and done at the end of the workday. That be said I am not a total imbecile, I think – 12 years in Particle Physics academia, 8 of them in China, self-taught Chinese and Russian fluently, 10+ years practicing Machine Learning and AI in various international firms, left-handed, can play “Ode To Joy” on the piano, blah blah blah. So without further ado …

Now as it has been said in many forms before, Greatness is built upon the little things, the fine details, the fundamentals, the shoulders of giants before us, or whatever you wish to call it. This is what I will focus on here, rather than the macroeconomics or global political strategy or the like, which I see as firmly standing on the ground build by the little things anyways. So what are the fine aspects of Modern China that I believe contribute strongly to its Greatness? Let this rolling journal be a record of what I notice…

First, there is the willingness to try new combinations of things. There are certainly great Chinese inventions we are all aware of (paper, gunpowder, etc.), and continue to be to this day in many exciting fields, but what stands out to me is the uncanny ability to combine already existing technologies in novel ways. Call it a “combinatoric mindset” if you will, but given N degrees of freedom in M dimensions, China will with certainly explore all N times M possibilities, and if even one of them works you hit the jackpot. That is Greatness at the end of the day. This, I believe, is not just due to the sheer number of Chinese, any one of which with some statistical significance is thinking about that solar+wind-powered streetlight (see pic below), but perhaps instilled in the linguistic properties of written Chinese --- the fact that day-to-day characters are combinations of several separate components (“radicals”) which contribute meaning --- and the very practical fact that this written linguistic structure is given to children at a very early age as part of their basic culture.

Secondly, there is decent effort to boost efficiency of what you already have. “Decent”, you say, why not “Absolute” ? Well every software engineer knows that “Premature optimization is the root of all evil”, and I think the Chinese society knows this unconsciously or not --- a rooftop soccer field on top of a parking garage is a decent accomplishment (see pic below), saving the recreational footprint of the civic area, but you wouldn’t want that on top of every building, probably. They’re trying things out, for god’s sake, little by little and finding what works.

Thirdly, there is extraordinary willingness to work around each other despite conflicting goals and interests. Given a society of billions of people, c’mon you’re gonna have conflict of interest, and nowhere is this more visible to the average urban dweller than city traffic. Now the interesting thing is that Chinese traffic just works. Cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, donkey-carts, huh? It all meshes. For conflict in life is inevitable, it makes sense to come up with a system to neutralize it if it really isn’t needed. And I see Chinese traffic as the embodiment of that spirit. First of all, you have plenty of very well-controlled intersections with countdown timers for left-turns, bicycles, etc. Needless to say those operate very orderly most of the time (see below). Yet you have plenty of uncontrolled intersections, interstices which would be unthinkable in most parts of the urban world, yet they just work in China. How? Watch the video, that’s all I have to say. Oh, and why most of the time this system works? Well it turns out, Chinese society is also very “quantum” (OK, here’s my particle physics background busting out) – that is to say, most of the time there is adherence to given spelled-out “classical” rules, but with occasion there is departure, and that’s OK (just have to “depart” in the right way!). Yeah you have departures from the departures, of course (what else would you expect, if you know what Feynman diagrams are?).

 

 

Street light powered by both solar and wind. Rooftop soccer game anyone? Modern intersection with all the bells and whistles. Click for a video of truly impressive spontaneous traffic flow.

 

 

 

 

home