Today’s email has absolutely nothing to do with presentations. If you’re here for presentation stuff, sorry about that. The next one will have something for you, I promise.
If you’re still here…
In 1992 and 1993 I was teaching English at a university in China. On my first day of teaching, the class let out an audible gasp when I walked into the room. I was the first foreigner they had ever seen. Not the first foreign teacher they had ever had. The first foreigner they had ever seen.
One weekend, I went with some of my students to visit another student in her village. As we walked along the dirt path into the village, a farmer looked up from his hoe. His greeting to me? “The last time I saw an American I was killing him in Korea.”
In addition to my freshman classes in the HVAC department (yes, there was a department of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) and the architecture department, I taught a class of graduate students. I asked them what they were going to do after graduation. They said they were going to build skyscrapers in Pudong, an area on the east end of Shanghai.
“Yeah, good luck with that,” I thought. At that time, Pudong was a big swamp. There was no way you could build anything there, much less a skyscraper.
I had no idea what was about to happen.
They, and many others, made good on their promise. Today the population of Pudong is larger than the population of Ankara. Imagine that. Just one part of Shanghai. Not the whole city, just a part of it. In 30 years, it has gone from being a swamp to holding more people than Turkey’s second-largest city.
Here’s another fact: The middle class in China is the size of 8 Turkeys. And that’s not the whole population of China. It’s just one part of it.
Give that a minute to sink in. One slice of the population in China is bigger than 8 entire nations of Turkey.
It’s almost impossible to realize the scale of what has happened to this group of people in a very short time. These days tariffs and trade wars and Trump are getting all the press, but amidst all that noise and bluster and distraction, it’s important to remember that this is what we are dealing with. Never in the history of mankind have we seen something of this scale happen so quickly.
That’s why I study Chinese every day, despite living in Turkey and having absolutely no day-to-day use for Chinese whatsoever. Apparently, it’s also why Apple manufactures iPhones in China. See this video of Apple’s Tim Cook:
