THE DRAGON IS AWAKE

Napoleon Bonaparte once compared China to a sleeping dragon and foretold that when it awoke it would move the world. His prediction has come to pass. In the past two decades, the Communist Party, with a mighty heave and a sharper capitalist approach, has given the country a completely new infrastructure and thus laid the foundations for a major economic boom. In the intervening period, the “Middle Kingdom” has visibly altered the ranking of the most important countries in the industrial world. As the third largest exporting nation in the world, it already ranks ahead of archrival Japan, and experts reckon that in a few years, China will depose Germany as the no. 1 exporter. Because today in China there are 109 million factory workers – more than twice the 53 million boasted by all of the G7 countries combined. China is set to build on this lead even further in the coming years, not least because a formidable share of global industrial concerns and even medium-sized companies are moving their production operations to this low-wage paradise.

It is therefore simply a question of time before the Research and Development divisions also go east, after all some 550,000 newly qualified engineers and scientists graduate from Chinese universities every year – more than three times the number of a decade ago. Even though the risks grow daily along with the opportunities, everyone from the worker on the factory floor to the leader at the top of the party are dreaming of a “Chinese century” – with good reason: China is developing faster than any other country and given that hundreds of millions of workers in the rural regions of this vast country are waiting in the wings for their chance, there is no end in sight. 10.2% in the past year, 9.5% this year, 8.8% for 2007 – according to the Asian Development Bank, this is the rate at which China is growing. Faced with this development, many people here at home are asking the question: where does the West stand? The fear of being overtaken by the Far East and of missing the boat reached Germany and Europe long ago, concrete answers on the other hand have yet to arrive. While Luis de Leon, Managing Director of Deutsche Bergbautechnik, calls for Germans to become more like the Chinese this industrial giant is itself increasingly checking out the greener pastures offered by China: some 2,000 German companies have bought into joint ventures in China as a result of the Asian-Pacific committee of the Deutsche Wirtschaft – ThyssenKrupp and RAG among them.