PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
Even as China moves to occupy a central position on the world stage, it's continually revealed as a disruptor of conventional assumptions. The "normal worldview" of the West—the framework of reasoning around things such as relative cost of labor, the nature and sentiments of the work force, privacy, and the rule of law in liberal democracy—is radically unfit for predicting how China will use capital, deploy people and technology, and compete.
This is not, mind you, another formulation of what the late Edward Said would have termed "orientalism": the quaint, postcolonial portrayal of Asia as "inscrutable" and "other." It's much more like a '90s-era "Web vs. bricks-and-mortar" proposition, where "getting it" suddenly lets you see vast disruptive changes on the horizon. The actual process of "getting it" isn't superhumanly difficult. But the stakes—as with "old economy/new economy"—are very high.
This point is continually brought home to me because my children were adopted from China, which connects you to a vast, largely grassroots system of local and national groups promoting the health and welfare of U.S. Chinese adoptees and their families, and indirectly to global resources promoting (for want of better words) "Chinese soft power." So it was that a year or so ago, I found myself in a group of adoptive parents, discussing how to satisfy our children's curiosity about their biological progenitors.
Within the U.S. Chinese adoptive community, the dialogue around biological parents is still dominated by a governing assumption that—because of fear of criminal prosecution under the famous one-child policy, haphazard records administration, the historically rollback-proof nature of Chinese diktat, and other systemic reasons—adoptee roots can't ever be traced, so positive knowledge will forever be impossible to come by. I made the point that, while this assumption might be reasonable for a static, midcentury China, it is by no means necessarily predictive of China today or tomorrow.
As to finding roots, I suggested that today's China might well see the benefits of creating a national DNA database that might, within 10 or so years, make parent-finding technologically feasible. While the idea of such a database has been floated in the West, it seems a long way off—mostly due to that framework of normative assumptions about things like privacy, human rights and the lack of a single (admissible) underlying motivation to justify cost.
China, meanwhile, is enormously wealthy, has a highly centralized power structure, suffers from none of these pesky privacy-and-rights hang-ups, and has unique problems such a database could help solve. Like how to manage and tax a huge internal migrant-worker population. Like a 5,000-year-old identity crisis arising in part from social upheavals disrupting record-keeping systems, and in part from the fact that fully 40 percent of Chinese worldwide share only 10 surnames.
Epic fail on the "convincing the other parents" front. They did not want to hear it. But last week, this BBC story came across the wire, reporting that, yes indeed, China is now creating a linked national system of DNA labs, repositories and databases to mitigate the growing problem of child abductions targeting migrant workers. In other words, a database engineered to link offspring with biological parents.
As William Gibson has said: "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."
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