China is simultaneously the world’s largest startup and the world’s largest turnaround. The country can draw on a 2,000-year tradition, but also on Western business know-how and technology – that is why it has been able to make progress so quickly.
If you think about the last decade of China’s economic and social development in terms of comparable changes in the history of the United States, you can feel the wind on your face. China is at once undergoing the raw capitalism of the robber baron era of the late 19th century; the speculative financial mania of the 1920s; the rural-to-urban migration of the 1930s; the emergence of the ‘first-car, first-home, first-fashionable clothes, first-college education, first-family vacation, middle-class consumer’ of the 1950s; and even aspects of social upheaval similar to the 1960s.