io9‘s Lisa Katayama makes her predictions for five trends that will follow China into the future. What we are looking forward to will include the growth of the world’s largest consumer markets:
…Right now, companies like GM, Johnson and Johnson, and Coca Cola produce first and foremost for the US market. But this will change. As the Chinese customer base catches up in size and influence, the way products are marketed and business is done will inevitably shift to meet demand…the global market would be more collectivistic, harmony-oriented [and] less rights-conscious.
and the new cool in green architecture and web-based tech:
According to EcoWorldly.com, [China] currently produces about 6GW of wind energy, which makes it fifth in the world. Some experts believe that China will reach at least 100GW in the next 12 years…
What Lisa is mentioning here is mainly plausible, sans the explosive growth in renewable energy infrastructure. My personal two cents is that there’ll be huge steps made in urban planning and public transport to cope with China’s massive metropolises and web based tech. that will develop as investment flows into China’s large, inexpensive and growing skilled labor base. Any predictions from Futurismic readers? What new trends will make their way into China’s future?
As soon as the Olympics are over, the factories and construction will fire up, leading to even more pollution, cancer clusters of childhood leukemia and repression for Uyghers and Tibetans for the next two years. In 2011, Chinese agriculture will completely break down, leading to middle class food riots, where YouTube will show footage of PLA draftees and nationalist thugs attacking mobs who are dressed in Armani tatters. Some Communist Party silverbacks will be put out to pasture, some executed after show trials, but nothing will be fixed. The Chinese bureaucracy, from the local to the federal levels, is too broken and corrupt to do anything less than implode in a way that takes a quarter of its population down with it.
But, hey, great buildings there, guys. Keep plowing under those hutongs. You’ll beat Dubai in no time.
(I should mention that this is based on my brief trip to Chengdu and Shanghai last summer. The people were friendly, the air made my brain hurt, and the rate of demolition and construction was so mind-blending that it makes my Los Angeles neighborhood seem like a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Makes me more of a China expert than David Brooks, at least.)
What expectations they have, and yet they invest so little in non-petrochemical sources of energy… I hope they will be right but personalluy I anticipate China (and many other nations) to implode before 2020.