The committee of 100 was formed just over a decade ago by architect I.M. Pei, Yo-Yo Ma, Shirley Young and a few dozen other notable Chinese-Americans; over the years it has grown to a bit over one hundred members, all variously distinguished in their fields and committed to improving Sino-US relations. The conference topics ranged from culture to geopolitics-but much of the focus was on business and technology.
That’s not surprising: In the midst of the US and European slowdown, you can’t attend a business gathering these days without hearing about the importance of the Chinese market, especially in high technology. Everyone from Microsoft and Yahoo to Dell and Palm spends substantial time and money courting Chinese business. Yet much of that talk is still about the potential, rather than real profits. And there are some troubling questions about China’s future as a technology bonanza for Western companies.
That begins with geopolitical uncertainty, particularly the current instability in North Korea and the ongoing differences over Taiwan. But at the Committee of 100 conference long-time China watcher Seymour Topping (a New York Times reporter in the region before, during and after the Korea War) emphasized the differences between then and now. While China would certainly be against the use of force against North Korea–fearing the flood of refugees it might unleash–Topping suggested that with steady communication a solution to the North Korean situation should be possible without destabilizing the US-China relationship itself. Randall Schriver, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, added: “We’re now in a period of unprecedented regular contact between senior officials,” expressing confidence that “we can prevent even Taiwan from derailing all the other bilateral issues.”
Economic uncertainty is a larger issue, now that China has entered a fiscal slowdown itself. Unemployment is up significantly since 1997, and some commentators are even suggesting a possible economic collapse. University of California economist Wing Thye Woo feels the disaster scenario is overplayed: China’s annual growth rate is still above 5%, a number the US would love to boast. But China does face new challenges as it joins the World Trade Organization and is compelled to stop subsidizing unprofitable state enterprises. Wing points out, however, that the Chinese have a tremendous savings rate, and that as soon as the state financial sector establishes secure and trustworthy ways to invest those savings in local business, economic change can occur without undermining political stability.
Larger challenges confront the Chinese in their West, where the population remains for the most part rural and poor. One speaker recalled that China recently sent a delegation to study how the United States had settled its West; unfortunately, he said, they didn’t consider the fact that in the United States, when you go far enough west, you’re at another ocean with harbors and ports. In China’s far west, you run into a 21,000 foot mountain range. But there’s one similarity to the American west: in western China and elsewhere, water is also a growing concern. Fossil aquifers are being drained and in areas the land is actually subsiding. Both the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers no longer reach the ocean.
SARS, of course, provided a constant undertone to the conference. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist, noted that the impact of SARS is already disproportionate to the actual number of people infected. “Diseases,” he said, “don’t just make workers sick-they disrupt economic processes.” This was the model Sachs developed studying the relationship between poverty and the incidence of malaria, and it fits SARS perfectly: the interruption of tourism and business travel has already caused analysts to trim a full percentage point off the GDP of Hong Kong this year, and no one is yet certain about China.
But SARS is not China’s greatest health concern. One of the organizers of this year’s Committee of 100 conference was David Ho, the noted AIDS researcher who is now active as well in advising the Chinese government. While SARS seems to still be in a growth phase, he says, the future impact of the disease is not yet clear. AIDS, on the other hand, will worsen substantially over the next decade. No one even knows how many AIDS cases there are in China: there is simply not enough testing available, as well as an unknown degree of information suppression by the government. And public health care in rural areas has actually taken a step backward from the “barefoot doctor” programs of the Mao years.
In the end, however, beyond all the macro uncertainties, China’s future will be in large part determined by individuals and their relationships. In high technology, for example, a new generation of Chinese and Americans is working together to build businesses. Peter Liu, an active member of the Committee, is a California-based venture capitalist, with offices in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Liu lives in San Francisco but has made over 100 trips to mainland China, developing relationships with government officials and helping his Taiwanese investments build factories on the mainland.
Liu, for one, is quite confident that there will be increasing US investment in China, and that the mainland will be the source of good deals to come. In fact, his son, a graduate of an American university, is about to start working on his MBA in Shanghai–the best way, says Liu, for him to meet the business people and technologists he’s likely to work with for years to come.
