Postcards From Tomorrow Square Read Online Free PDF Page B

inside can get off. Yet the more crowded the station, the more certain that there will be a line-of-scrimmage standoff as the people trying to surge in block those trying to escape. In a perverse way, I was relieved when I read that China’s traffic-death rate per mile driven was nearly ten times as high as America’s: I wasn’t crazy in thinking that the streets were a reckless free-for-all. The writer Gwynne Dyer recently explained that such carnage is typical of cultures in which virtually everyone behind a wheel is a “first-generation driver,” raised with no exposure to traffic laws, defensive driving, or the damage cars can do. As more Chinese travel abroad as tourists, and China prepares to welcome more foreign travelers when the Olympics begin, the government has launched a “mind your manners” campaign urging people to stop “hawking” (noisily clearing their throats) and spitting on the street, to stop cutting to the front of lines, and to stop yelling at one another and into their mobile phones. Good luck!
    The climate is that of the frontier, with an erratically vigilant sheriff showing up from time to time to crack heads. The untamed energies of individual Chinese have obviously helped the country grow, but some people have argued to me that the lack of Japanese-style collective virtues imposes limits on China. “We have a huge economy,” the founder of a Chinese software company told me at dinner one night, “but we don’t have any big companies. Why is that?” Depending on how it’s measured, China’s economy is either the third-, fourth-, or fifth-largest in the world. But only three mainland Chinese companies are among the top 500 in Forbes ’s list of international companies, with the largest, PetroChina, at No. 57.
    This man’s answer was that scale requires trust, and “there is no trust in China.” People don’t trust others outside their family, he said. “They don’t trust the Internet. Or doctors. Or the mobile-phone company to bill them honestly. Or, of course, the government.” Building a company beyond the family scale requires many layers of trust: in accountants, underwriters, the financial markets, the rule of law. “People are all looking for the profit in the next two years, so they cannot grow,” this man concluded. Would his company list shares on the stock exchange? “Ha!” he said. “The economy keeps growing, and the stock market keeps falling.” The big problem for the markets is what financiers call “lack of transparency”—that is, the difficulty in knowing whether a given firm is making or losing money, and the suspicion that it is keeping several sets of books.
    “Corruption, corruption, corruption!” another technology executive exclaimed to me. “You could knock off a hundred corrupt officials a day and you would not make a dent.” To take just one indicative example: High government officials have recently found it desirable to be “scholarly.” Thus universities have become accustomed to dignitaries who attend a few classes and soon get a Ph.D. Japan has always had its scandals—I was living there when police found gold bars and $50 million in the home and offices of Shin Kanemaru, a backstairs power in the ruling party. The most famous South Korean CEOs of the 1980s ended up in jail. But those countries—unlike Russia, the Philippines, or Indonesia—manage to keep their corruption within the “efficient” range, where it will not impede the growth of business. So far, China’s corruption must also have been kept efficient—how else could the country have come so far so fast? But I’ve been surprised to hear how often corruption is mentioned as a major long-term threat.
    And now we confront Two Great Mysteries of China, which concern its leadership and its ideals. I’m not referring to a host of Minor Mysteries I hope to comprehend over time. For instance, the miracle of the malls: how so much of Shanghai’s showy new retail malls