Wen Jiabao: Sustainability In Mandarin

06 Sep 2007 – John Elkington

Arriving late after facilitating another session, I found so many people crowded into the Plenary Hall to hear Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao deliver his speech on a growing China’s ambition to embrace a “Bright Future” that the supply of simultaneous translation headphones had run out. So, in a space that seemed to have a couple of thousand people packed in, I propped myself against a wall and listened to him in full flow – in Mandarin. A bit like watching one of those airline films with the sound turned off, though in this case you could hear the regular rounds of applause. And it was interesting to see the languages offered, had I had headphones: English, Mandarin, Japanese and Russian. Luckily, the World Economic Forum then supplied translations of the speech, which – to my mind at least – turned out to be remarkably candid.

The Premier welcomed the fact that the World Economic Forum will now hold an annual ‘Summer Davos’ in China. He underscored the relevance of the Forum’s continuing overall theme of the ‘Shifting Power Equation’ and the focus of this Dalian summit on the ‘New Champions.’ And then he switched on the candour, speaking, among other things, of “problems such as unstable factors, imbalances and lack of sustainability” that are impacting China’s development and future prospects. These include, he said, “excessively rapid economic growth, acute structural tensions, the inefficient pattern of growth, depletion of resources and environmental degradation, mounting pressure on prices and entrenched structural and institutional obstacles.” Given all of which – and this has been an observation made by many I have talked to here in Dalian – it is quite remarkable how far China has come in relatively short historical order.

While my fingers are crossed that this century will see Wen Jiabao’s vision – “of a “prosperous, democratic, harmonious, civilized and modernized China” making an “even greater contribution to maintaining world peace and promoting world progress” – it’s very hard to imagine a future without some major demographic, health, environmental and/or military discontinuities. Having said which, there is something about China’s extraordinary focus on the future and the ambition to get things right which I find remarkably energizing. And, like many visitors to this extraordinary country, I worry increasingly about Europe’s capacity to respond to the competitive challenge posed by a society that is developing such momentum.

Although SustainAbility is now determined to develop a physical presence in India from 2008, there is no question in my mind that we also have to be on the ground in China before long. In the session I facilitated earlier today on ‘Managing Regulatory Risk,’ I was very struck by an Indian participant’s observation that India’s weakness is its democracy, while China’s strength is its lack of the same. The net result, he said, is that it takes India ten times as long to do anything significant. Then he paused, before adding that he thought longer term democracy would serve India better than any alternative system. In short, we are embarked on a vast, global experiment to test which of several competing political and economic models will dominate – and facilitate – sustainable human evolution.

Which is one reason why I have been so excited to be involved, in my capacity as Chairman of The Environment Foundation in a two-part conference on ‘Democracy & Sustainability,’ to be held at London’s Science Museum on 23 October and in London’s Living Room, atop the GLA HQ building by Tower Bridge, on 24 October. I will chair the first session, Lord Patten the second.

SustainAbility – largely, I suspect because of my own aversions, formed during early work in the early 1970s – has tended to shy away from politics, government and public policy, but increasingly these domains will be central to the definition and delivery of sustainable development. And SustainAbility and I are thus now jointly pushing into that space to campaign and advocate with business leaders and others for the policy frameworks we need to support sustainable development goals – whether related to climate, water, or human rights. I feel rather like Bill Gates must have done when he finally woke up to the power of the Internet – with all the associated risks and opportunities in terms of Microsoft’s till-then successful business model. And we are going to have to learn to handle all of this in Hindi, Mandarin and – who knows – even in Russian.