Humble wheel spins its cycle of economic magic in China
Some still believe the wheel is man’s greatest invention (never mind big data, artificial intelligence, supercomputers, superconductors and nanotech).
Arguably, the wheel is also one of China’s best kept economic secrets.
I should know. I come from India, a comparable nation (population: 1.35 billion vs 1.41 billion) that’s struggling to match China’s economic heft (2017 GDP: $2.60 trillion vs $12.23 trillion) even as it celebrates its 72nd Independence Day on Wednesday. That struggle can be ascribed to India’s inability to master the wheel like China.
Here, “wheel” is a metaphor for mobility, and not a reference to the Indian philosophical symbol for Time. (There may be some vague correlation though — mobility solutions quicken movement of people and goods by shortening distances and saving time; since “time is money”, it follows that mobility equals money, a positive for the economy.)
Talking of time, it’s been three years since I landed in China. I still can’t stop marveling at the country’s newfound knack of drawing simple insights and acting upon them in a way that transforms millions of lives.
Developing countries like India are yet to crack this puzzle. It’s a no-brainer that infrastructure like highways, roads, bridges is the key to development. How many developing countries can match China’s infrastructure record?
But roads alone won’t suffice. You need wheels (or vehicles, a variety of them) too. Empower a citizen with affordable mobility, create goodquality arteries (that is, meld man, machine and motorway), and laugh all the way to the bank — that simple formula seems to be China’s secret, which appears to be lost on other developing countries.
In my fantasy, the Indian leadership begs its Chinese counterpart for tips at summits, and receives practical economic advice: “Elementary, son. Wheel.”
It’s easy to ignore the significance of the wheel, or the Old Economy, when buzzwords and abbreviations like AI, big data, automation, virtual reality, augmented reality, New Retail dominate headlines and create an impression that the New Economy alone matters in the new era.
But trends in China indicate technology may be most effective as an agent of growth when it marries man with mobility. It’s the wheel, stupid.
Look at how the wheel (hundreds of varieties of affordable, reliable electric two-, three- and four-wheelers) has not only created opportunities for multitudes of Chinese, who work as deliverymen or couriers for food and online shopping services, but helped sustain new businesses and stoked consumption, which is now an economic driver. Local commerce continues to grow on the back of a plethora of micro-businesses-on-wheels: mobile fruit stalls, vegetable stalls, book stalls, fast-food stalls, socks, kerchief and underwear stalls, poster-stalls and what have you. Mobility manufactures money indeed.
It comes as little surprise that Beijing is conducting trials of driverless cars, while Guizhou province experiments with Elon Musk’s hyperloop system; Chengdu in Sichuan province has embraced “Panda” suspension trains, and its local university is busy with reasearch and development of ultrafast, extreme-tech tube transport system whose trial speeds are expected to set a world record soon; Shanghai and other cities are adopting maglev technology; bullet trains are increasing countrywide.
Even expatriates have ease of access to affordable modern personal transport in the form of a wide range of electric scooters, mopeds, bicycles and hoverboards. They can be bought online in a jiffy, and require neither license nor helmets. For perspective: India took decades to allow the manufacture and sale of the quadricycle, a new category of four-wheeled taxi.
It’s not as if China is infallible in mobility. The wheels are coming off in some mobility segments. Didi taxis are no longer easily available during peak hours. Old-fashioned three-wheeler tuk-tuks are not yet part of apps.
City arteries are clogged even on weekends — there are just far too many wheels vying for space. Poor big data solutions and sluggish AI keep transport apps from enabling ride-sharing by, say, three independent passengers traveling in the same direction.
Shared wheels, in the form of app-based rentable bicycle services, have become sources of parking lot nuisance, potential financial scandals, tech embarrassment and safety hazards for riders.