The Little Emperors are poised to put China on top of the world

THE Little Emperors, they call them, and they can be counted in tens of millions. They are the young generation of China, and the main reason why that country will surely become the next and perhaps the greatest superpower in the world.

In 1980, the then Chinese government instituted a new family policy. It insisted that for the foreseeable future, and with very few exceptions, each family could have only one child.

Families that disobeyed this law were penalised in all sorts of ways, including through the tax system, but also in terms of access to housing, health benefits, and in other ways. As a result, millions and millions of families with one child now exist in China.

They live in cities that many of us have never heard of — certainly I hadn’t before I went there — that are the new metropolises of the world. We all know of Beijing and Shanghai, of course, though I certainly didn’t know that Shanghai is a far more dynamic and vibrant city than, say, New York or Paris.

But have you ever heard of Chong Qing, Wohan or Chengdu? Each of those cities has a population bigger than Ireland — the Chong Qing (pronounced Chunching) metropolitan area has more than 30 million people, with a downtown population of about 12 million. And these are only some examples of the astonishing trend towards urbanisation in modern China.

The country may still be largely rural and agricultural, but the pace of change is so rapid that huge, modern cities now exist where rural villagers lived less than a decade ago.

The Three Gorges Dam, for example, was planned and built as the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, and it is genuinely immense. When it was being designed, it was seen as being capable of meeting 10% of China’s electricity needs. But even though it is bang on target in terms of timescale, demand for electricity has grown so much that the dam will supply no more than 4% or 5% of what’s needed. So China is now planning the construction of not only more dams on the Yangtze river, but also about 20 nuclear power stations.

The great cities of China have all been built with a plan in mind. The central control made possible by the Chinese style of government (though it can no longer be regarded as communist in anything but name) has contributed in remarkable ways to the development of infrastructure all over the country. If a new financial centre is needed, and 10,000 families are in the way, they are simply moved. But they are moved, by and large, to better housing than they had previously with bigger rooms, more air-conditioning, better leisure facilities. And they move without protest, and no Chinese person you speak to sees anything wrong with this approach.

Most of the Chinese people I’ve spoken to are the Little Emperors I referred to earlier. It’s going to be fascinating, whenever they come into their ascendancy, to see a country run by an entire generation of children who were raised without brothers or sisters, and who have no concept of what it would be like to have any family apart from parents or grandparents.

But this generation has been given the very best their country has to offer, as well as all their parents can give them. They are all university-educated, most have a foreign language, and all have a skill that will be useful to the state in the fullness of time. Because that, too, was all part of the plan.

When China decided, five years or so ago, that it didn’t have enough university places in one city, Shanghai, they did something about it. They built seven different top-class universities, all on one campus that is now called University Town. It houses and trains 140,000 young people every year, filling gaps in the range of skills the country needs.

And the young people coming out of these universities have a different concept of their own history, too. They are schooled in the history of the Chinese dynasties, but their modern history is much more vague. They remember Mao, of course, but as a philosopher and sage, not as a practical ruler. For most of the young Chinese, history really began with Deng Xiaou Ping, the man who survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution and began the process of opening up China’s economy to the rest of the world.

Talk to these young people about human rights and they look at you blankly. In your country, they ask, is every single citizen being educated to the maximum of his or her potential? Is the wealth of the country being used to provide better and better services for all its citizens?

Are minorities given special rights and privileges as they are in China, with great respect for traditional cultures? There is no answer really to these questions, perhaps just a troubling sense that as they get older, these young people also will begin to realise that consumerism isn’t everything, that centralised and highly bureaucratic control of people’s lives doesn’t fulfil every promise. For now, for most of them, consumerism is everything. I’m no expert, but I suspect there is no other economy in the world that is so driven by consumer demand. China is one of the richest countries in the world because of its natural resources and also as a result of its sheer size. But also, nowhere in the world do shopping malls exist like the ones in every city in China, with affordable consumer goods side by side with every conceivable designer label.

MILLIONS throng the brightly-lit shops until all hours of the night, buying as if there was no tomorrow. Then they go home to play the local stock exchange on their home computers, utilising the broadband that seems to have reached even the most remote corners of the country.

China doesn’t have all the answers, of course. They don’t seem to me to be innovators — nothing has been invented in China, they say, since they discovered the silk worm. But they are master copyists, and they pride themselves on it. Give any factory a detailed enough specification and it will be reproduced faithfully, accurately, and in superb quality. And at a fraction of the cost, at least so far, that it can be produced in the west.

Above all, it seems to me, this new generation of Chinese people are the key to the future, not only of their own country but perhaps of the world. And the world will be astonished when it sees the emergence of China, starting with next year’s Beijing Olympics.

I suspect that when China’s astonishing infrastructure, its magnificent buildings and cityscapes, and its mix of age-old culture with the most modern and dynamic outlook, are shown on our televisions, the misconceptions we all have about this ancient and yet very young country will be blown away. China may not be a threat to world security any more, as it was in the past, but it represents the greatest economic challenge the west has ever faced. The Little Emperors, without a doubt, will be the economic emperors of the future.