The future according to young Chinese leaders | Ideal

The future depends on many things, but there are two that stand out above the rest and that affect us all: climate change, which can only be combated by building a sustainable and decarbonised socioeconomic model at full speed, and the revolution that new technologies are fostering such as automation and artificial intelligence, which threaten up to 40% of jobs.

In all this, China is going to play a fundamental role: it is the country that pollutes the most in the world in absolute terms -28% of global emissions- and the second that invests the most in R&D, with special emphasis on leading sectors such as that of quantum computing or electric mobility. To a large extent, it will be the young and dynamic ecosystem of 'startups' of the Asian giant that will propose solutions to these challenges. For this reason, the Spain-China Council Foundation, promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has brought together six future Chinese leaders in a meeting moderated by this journalist.

"Startups are key in boosting the Chinese economy," says Zhou Wei, founder and CEO of the Xnode accelerator. In his opinion, after having overcome a first stage in which it was limited to copying to learn, China has made a qualitative leap in innovation and has two great advantages over other countries: an internal market that will soon be the largest of the planet, and an abundant talent that, in part, has been trained abroad and is now returning to develop their professional career at home.

For this reason, and although he sometimes gives the impression that China is closing in on itself, Zhou foresees that more and more Chinese companies will follow in the footsteps of Huawei or Alibaba and reap global success. "They seek to increase their market share, as European or American multinationals did in their day," says the entrepreneur, who calls for more collaboration and less confrontation between powers.

But no one escapes one of the most controversial peculiarities of China. "It's a one-party country," says Nelson Wang, a doctor of electrical engineering and founder of Czar Power, which develops systems to charge electric cars without using fossil fuels. The Government designs its five-year plans and, although the country has something similar to a market economy, with them it determines the areas to which it will channel its resources, also indicating in which direction private initiative should go. The best example of this is electric mobility, which China leads globally with an amazing advantage.

“Through incentives such as registration tax exemption, subsidies, and tax breaks, it makes electric cars competitive. And, in turn, it discourages the manufacture of traditional ones," explains Wang, who also points out a difference that separates China from countries like Spain: "Electricity is cheap and gasoline is expensive."

As was the case with smartphones, which were a key element in changing the Western population's perception of the quality of Chinese products, Wang expects Chinese electric vehicles to be widely accepted around the world: "We have companies powerful as BYD or NIO. Now they lose money like Tesla did in the beginning, but the sector has the best of futures. Asked about the hydrogen alternative, the technology that Spain is most committed to, Wang assures that "it is one of the great candidates to replace fossil fuels" and believes that it will coexist with batteries. "Hydrogen offers greater autonomy and shorter recharging time, but it is also more expensive, more dangerous - it is explosive in contact with oxygen - and more difficult to transport." It can be interesting for the transport of goods.

In any case, more important than having clean vehicles is sustainably generating the energy with which they are charged. And, in China, 70% of what is consumed still comes from power plants that burn coal. «The Government has committed to reaching the peak of emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2060 -a decade after the European Union-. Achieving these goals requires major changes,” says Cui Bolong, founder of specialist energy and environmental protection consultancy Syserise. "It will not be easy. This year, for example, most provinces have already spent their emission quotas. That's one of the reasons we see power outages," he says.

In Cui's opinion, the success of China's most important transformation depends on the achievement of four major objectives: "Build a 'green' energy structure in which renewable energies predominate, increase the energy efficiency of companies, innovate in of carbon sequestration and the awareness of the population».

Sissy Chao knows a lot about the latter. Considered by Forbes one of the 30 most promising people under 30 in China, she founded REMake Hub, specialized in clothing recycling, after seeing all the material that was wasted in her parents' factory, suppliers of such relevant brands. Like Zara or H&M. In her opinion, and although she emphasizes that no one can speak for the 1.4 billion Chinese, the population is much more aware.

"In big cities we already classify garbage and people are more aware of their environmental footprint," she points out. Chao is confident that the power of the consumer will cause a change of direction in Chinese fast fashion brands, one of the sectors that pollutes the most, and that they will follow in the footsteps of her Western counterparts. "In 2013 we visited Zara and even then they told us that they were developing the circular economy," recalls Chao, who is also convinced that new technologies can play a key role in sustainability. For example, so that the client knows what the path of the garment she wears has been, she uses the 'blockchain'.

Richard Tong moves in the most fascinating and terrifying sector: that of artificial intelligence. Specifically, in which it applies to education. In the world of the future that Tong envisions, cars don't fly, but algorithms will teach 10,000 students with vastly different needs simultaneously. "AI will personalize education and make it more interactive," he says, indicating that, as will also happen in healthcare, these new systems will especially help the most disadvantaged. “The rich can send their children to private lessons, but in many rural areas children of different ages are even mixed. AI offers the equivalent of an exclusive education with a very low investment », he comments.

And Tong knows what he is talking about, because, in collaboration with Stanford University, he has launched a project to train 10,000 students in the southern province of Sichuan using artificial intelligence in a part of them, to compare the results with the of traditional education. "Preliminary results already show that it is salvation for those with less access to education," he declares.

“It is not about eliminating teachers or doctors, but about avoiding the most tedious jobs so that they can focus on providing a better service in less time,” he adds, before recalling that “jobs have been destroyed in all technological revolutions” and that "nothing can be done against it, because it is the way technology is developed."

What can be improved is the quality of life in cities, which have exploded after the largest process of rural migration in history. But, in the opinion of Jiang Jun, founder of Urban China Magazine, "they have been developed with a model of urbanism that is not sustainable and that must change" so that they are more inclusive, sustainable, and kind to human beings, who must be always at the center of the coming revolutions.