Change the Menu for China, or the Chinese Will Continue to ‘Eat Our Lunch’
By Dick J. Batchelor
I recently had an opportunity, along with a business colleague named Mrs. Doris Duan-Young, to represent Orlando at the 25th-anniversary celebration of its sister-city relationship with Guilin, China. In addition to participating in the China-Guilin International Tourism Exhibition, we also visited Beijing and Shanghai.
Guilin is a relatively small city of about half a million residents. I noted, however, that although this was only Guilin’s second international tourism exhibition, it attracted 59 countries from all parts of the world. This demonstrates that the Chinese are aggressive about all sectors of their economy, including tourism. Then I saw Shanghai, which has more than 22 million residents. I could not help but be impressed that it is essentially a brand-new city, with countless luxurious and modern high-rises that have come to dominate Shanghai’s skyline in less than 20 years.
In Beijing, after I spent time with the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy and representatives of the People’s Republic of China, I could not help to think about New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. His recent book, “That Used to Be Us,” ruminates on what America must do so that China will not continue to “eat our lunch.” He focuses on the need for the United States to exercise its pure potential. He concludes that China is getting 90 percent of potential benefits from its second- rate political system, while the United States is gets only 50 percent of benefits from our first-rate system.
Further, Friedman contends that our biggest problem is not that we’re failing to keep up with China’s best practices. Instead, he says, Americans have strayed so far from our own best practices: “We’re really talking about ourselves and our own laws of self-confidence,” he writes. Each of the big challenges that Friedman sees somehow involves China: how to adapt to globalization, how to adjust to the revolution of information technology, how to cope with soaring budget deficits, and how to manage a world vexed by increasing energy consumption and rising climate interest.
The overriding factor is education, the common denominator of challenges. And it is a big challenge. “Under-education” leaves so many people in our country unemployed. During the depth of the U.S. recession in the early 1980s, for example, about 15 percent of prime-age men were not working. Today, the percentage of men who aren’t working has spiked to 18 percent. Why? Maybe it’s because the once plentiful low-pay, low-skilled jobs are gone, and the best that Americans can hope for now are low-paid jobs with high-skill requirements. Then consider that not enough students graduate from high school, not enough go on to college, and those who do go to college require more and more remedial education. Yes, we continue to fall behind in the math and sciences.
As an example, at Grinnell, a college of only 1,600 students in Iowa, nearly one of every 10 applicants under consideration for the class of 2015 comes from China. Half of the applicants from China achieve perfect scores on the math portion of their SAT, offering extraordinary competition for American students. Yet China still has far to go. It is rife with charges of human-rights issues; its environment grows dirtier instead of cleaner; and it must retool its economy to meet the needs of so many disadvantaged or unemployed workers. China will be competitive; the United States must compete more keenly to be effective. We must redouble efforts to better educate students so that they are well-equipped to conquer global challenges that define America’s role in the contemporary international economy.
In short, change the menu – our focus – or China will “each our lunch.”
Dick Batchelor is a former member of the Florida House of Representatives. Dick Batchelor Management Group Inc. is a renowned consulting firm specializing in business development consulting, strategic governmental affairs and public policy issues.