When you fly from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to New York Newark Airport, you will feel what it means from the airport of the first world to the airport of the third world.
At the end of my tour of Germany in early June, when I returned from the stale Berlin airport to terminal 3, a giant new capital airport, fellow reporters laughed and said, "the facilities in the developing world are developed!"
Over the past few years, I have travelled to and from the United States, Japan, and Europe many times, and there are many similar feelings in cross-cultural exchanges and observations:
Looking at Manhattan Island from Brooklyn's filthy Riverside Park, I don't think it's more amazing than looking at Lujiazui from the Bund. From Hangzhou to Shanghai, the Harmony had flown 350 kilometers; but from Tokyo to Sendai, the northeast Shinkansen had few speeds of more than 250 kilometers. In Hamburg, Germany, smart cities are being built in full swing, but the internet technology is no more advanced than Beijing's.
Thirty years ago, when a Chinese came to the United States, he was shocked by airports, highways, supermarkets, skyscrapers; for today's Chinese, the sense of visual impact is gone. So the question is, why is China still a developing country? How can it be considered a developed country?
Of course, whether developed countries can be measured by a number of indicators, such as gross domestic product, per capita national income, life expectancy, literacy rate, level of industrialization. But in recent years, I have gradually formed some subjective judgment methods in cross-border travel. In a nutshell, developed countries do three things regardless of cost.
First, pay for the weak.
Just as the capacity of a bucket is determined not by the long board but by the deficiency; the criterion for assessing a country's degree of development is not the height of the strong but the status of the weak.
The status of the weak is reflected in all aspects of social life: in Hamburg, buses arrive at the station will use hydraulic tilting body, convenient leg and foot inconvenience of the elderly or disabled people to get on and off; In Tokyo, all subway doors are stamped with Braille to tell the blind where the car is located; in New Haven, the government subsidy allows poor people to live in the same apartment as Yale Medical School Ph.D. Students.
Paying for the weak means, first and foremost, a completely disproportionate amount of money (such as public facilities that serve the blind and the elderly), which is the social powerhouse that pays for the weak. On the other hand, excessive pursuit of financial benefits, the weak pay for the strong, is a sign of social underdevelopment (imagine Beijing has a few blind roads not occupied by parking spaces or shops).
To pay for the weak also means the spiritual sublimation of the whole society. In Hamburg, a Cisco manager showed me that he had developed a medical container for refugees using donations to provide medical assistance to refugees pouring into Germany.
For many, refugees with social problems and no economic benefits are not welcome, while the Cisco manager insists: "they need help." When the spirit of humanitarianism transcends pragmatism and there is a large number of social groups willing to serve the weak regardless of cost, the country must be a developed country.
Second, pay for the details.
Paying attention to the quality of detail, not the grand look, is perhaps the commonality of the developed countries I have gone through. Tokyo's Narita airport may not be as modern as Beijing's capital airport, but the public toilet facilities on the streets of Shinjuku are definitely comparable to Beijing's five-star hotel. Although the high-rise buildings in a third-tier city in China are not inferior to Osaka, in Japan, I can drink water directly in remote towns.
To pay for the details also means to be impatient. In New York Brooklyn, local friends introduced me to local community development. In front of a wasteland, friends said it took 40 years for the local government to clean up soil and water pollution because it had been used as a chemical plant, so even expensive land prices had to be idle.
Face easy to learn, hard to make up; economic development can be very fast, but social development needs patience. Boast of high-rise building hard power, ignore the quality of life soft power, this is not the mentality of developed countries.
Again, pay for the future:
In the German town of Botrop, which has a population of just one hundred and twenty thousand, I visited the newly established university HRW, the city's second university, with more than 70 professors. Mayor Tixerox said: "We need to invest in the future of the city." This reminds me of my hometown, Jiangyin, the country's top 100 county, with 36 listed companies with a population of 1.6 million, but no real university.
In Botrop, I also visited an apartment called "House of the Future," which was aimed at making the building more environmentally friendly and energy efficient, but it would take at least 15 years for the cost of the renovation to be recovered through rent recovery. In the face of such an uneconomical plan, the reason for investors is simple: this is the future.
In America, where oil prices are cheap, Americans have bought 1.6 million Toyota hybrids twice as expensive as their gasoline counterparts since 2000 for just one environmental concept. In Germany, in support of green electricity, Germans have endured a doubling of electricity prices over the past decade.
All these seemingly irrational actions are actually paid for the future. If the inhabitants of a country are only willing to pay for cheap services and goods and do not intend to make long-term plans and investments for the future, they are only willing to take care of their immediate economic interests. It is difficult for the country to evolve from a developing country that follows development to a developed country that leads development.
A bird's eye view of Berlin: Berlin has a very high per capita output, but rare high-rise buildings and demolition
After my visit to Germany, I lamented that the backward high-speed rail network, old infrastructure and low-rise buildings seemed less "developed" than most Chinese thought.
"what is developed?"
German Federal Agency for Foreign Trade and Investment expert Henin Ehlermann asked.
"developed buildings, developed railways, advanced technologies. These are just tools to achieve goals, not goals worth pursuing.