Nightmare scenario if China tries to live the American Dream

We already know who will be the next party leader: vice president Xi Jinping. What we don’t know is what matters: does Xi have a “Chinese Dream” that is different from the “American Dream?” Because if Xi’s dream for China’s emerging middle class – 300 million people expected to grow to 800 million by 2025 – is just like the American Dream (a big car, a big house and Big Macs for all) then we need another planet.

Spend a week in China and you’ll see why. Here’s a Shanghai Daily headline from September 7th: “City Warned of Water Resource Shortage”. The article said: “Shanghai may face a shortage of water resources if the population continues to soar

. . . The current capacity of the city’s water supply is about 16 million tons per day, which is able to cover the demand of 26 million people. However, once the population reaches 30 million, the demand would rise to 18 million tons per day, exceeding the current capacity.” Shanghai will hit 30 million in about seven years!

“Success in the ‘American Dream’,” notes Peggy Liu, the founder of the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, or Juccce, “used to just mean a house, a family of four and two cars, but now it’s escalated to conspicuous consumption as epitomised by Kim Kardashian. China simply cannot follow that path – or the planet will be stripped bare of natural resources to make all that the Chinese consumers want to consume.”

Liu, an MIT graduate and former McKinsey consultant, argues that Chinese today are yearning to create a new national identity, one that merges traditional Chinese values, such as balance, respect and flow, with its modern urban reality. She believes that the creation of a sustainable “Chinese Dream” that breaks the historic link between income growth and rising resource consumption could be a part of that new identity.

So Juccce has been working with Chinese mayors and social networks, sustainability experts and western advertising agencies to catalyse sustainable habits in the emergent consuming class by redefining personal prosperity – which so many more Chinese are gaining access to for the first time – as “more access to better products and services, not necessarily by owning them, but also by sharing – so everyone gets a piece of a better pie.”

That means better public transportation, better public spaces and better housing that encourages dense vertical buildings, which are more energy efficient and make shared services easier to deliver, and more e-learning opportunities that reduce commuting.