Don't Compare GDPs With America

�VROOM, VROOM, VROOM, VROOM�� was the biggest impression of my visit to Dallas-Fort Worth three weeks ago. It really is hard to understand why Americans are so intoxicated with the ear-piercing, thundering sound from a 3.5 or even 4-plus high-powered engine.

A Chinese friend in America told me he really was not used to driving in America at first; as soon as he lightly tapped the gas pedal, the car shot off like an arrow. Each time it happened it really scared him.

What that huge thundering sound undoubtedly represents is American energy consumption. Using energy consumption to satisfy the extreme material demands of Americans is something unique to America, and it also very easily disgusts outsiders. It is estimated that the American per capita energy consumption amount is 30 times that of the Chinese.

In Fort Worth, almost every family has what the Chinese call a �villa.” An American friend who wouldn�t be considered rich invited me to his home. My estimate of the inside area of their home is roughly 800 square meters, with an outside area of about 800 square meters. I told him that in China only a trillionaire could have this kind of �normal� American home.

In that city, there were enormous parking lots everywhere, every family had two or three cars, and the four or five lane highway swallowed up a large chunk of land. People drove at full-speed shamelessly down the highway, and, occasionally, someone would be sending a text message on their cell phone at the same time.

No wonder a colleague had remarked that if indulging in wanton extravagance became a kind of national conduct, then society would be in a kind of morbid state�humanity would even be in a morbid state.

In Lansing, the Michigan state capital, I took note of the urban environment close to the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world�the bright yellow leaves of the maple trees, the not-too-cold, not-too-hot temperature, the large, colorful buildings on the sides of the streets, the pure blue sky and the pure white clouds.

I got my camera and casually snapped a picture that could be a photographic work of art. At such a site, every Chinese person from China would easily sigh with emotion and even feel jealous. I have been to hundreds of cities and towns in China and I have almost never seen a natural environment this good.

In Michigan, I told an accompanying American official that �China just can�t compete with America as far as natural gifts,� believing this myself for the first time. Of course, the implication here was that his predecessors were really very lucky to have discovered this kind of treasure land on earth and to have occupied it by doing whatever it took.

This is probably the only country in the world made up of immigrants from all over the globe with plentiful resources provided for their use. I believe that every person who has ever been to America�regardless of whether they are Chinese or Japanese or European�would immediately perceive that what America has is unparalleled throughout the world.

Recently, many in the media have said things like, �China will surpass America in a certain number of years� and �the financial crisis is speeding up China�s surpassing of America� and so on. People who say these types of things have either never been to America or they have never been to China. At least they have not seriously compared the natural gifts of the two countries.

Today, what we really need to do is to establish a new standard for evaluating the gap between China and America�or more precisely�the differences�between China and America.

A very famous Chinese scholar once told me that Chinese middle school textbooks have always read that China has the characteristic of having �vast territory and abundant resources,” but, if you want to discuss �vast territory and abundant resources,” how can China compare with America and Russia?

Just compare the area of arable and residential land of countries with territories similar to that of China�about two-thirds of Chinese land is uninhabitable. Yet, in America, only the few states located along the Rocky Mountain range have some desert.

An American diplomat told me that two years ago he spent $750,000 on a farm of about ten acres in the suburbs near Washington D.C. It included an 18th century house he was preparing to pass on to his descendants. I jokingly responded that to buy that kind of place at that price close to Beijing, you would have to go to Inner Mongolia, and, you could not buy a farm�you would have to buy a desert.

With this kind of difference in natural gifts, more and more of us now want to make comparisons with America�s national power, wondering when we will surpass the U.S. GDP, and so on. Actually, this is meaningless. The GDP is only the production capacity of a country, during some period, calculated by some method�it differs greatly from the true living situations of the citizens. But that is just the way we are�slowly sinking into the logic the Westerners invented of �replacing one hegemony with another.�

In this kind of situation, Chinese people need to know that if we follow the thinking of the Americans and get into a national power competition, there are only three possible results.

The first is that before the realization of being the �world�s top GDP� can take place, I�m afraid we would be infected by the maladies of the American lifestyle. If Chinese energy consumption follows the road of the Americans, in the end, the entire world would not even necessarily be able to bear the burden.

The second is if we throw ourselves into caring only about the GDP, which would raise our economy and widen our poverty gap, with social contradictions accumulating more and more, in the end, social division and continuous upheaval would occur.

The third is that if we adopt resource-wasting tactics and play in the GDP competition, sooner or later, there would be a day when China plays itself out, like the former Soviet Union did in its space race with the United States.

This is not meant at all to be a �China surrender discourse.� What I want to say, though, is that what we need is to have thought coefficients in the standards we use to measure nations for the governmental levels, the social levels, and the civil levels.

China does not need to compete with American national power. What China needs is to consider some things based more on China�s natural gifts, like the administration of its government, how to make the society more stable, the people more able to combat crises, and the lives of the civilians more prosperous; especially amidst global warming, the deterioration of the environment, and the exhaustion of natural resources. This is the state of mind the Chinese people should have now, when it seems like �China is developing and America is declining.�