李开复：中国搞21世纪数字经济的条件比美国有利

A few evenings ago, I had dinner with the Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee. He told me about an interesting dystopian sci-fi novel, Folding Beijing, which was translated into English recently and promptly won the Hugo Award for best novelette. The book is about an overcrowded and strictly class-divided capital city in which “first-tier” residents enjoy a normal 24-hour day, and second- and third-tier citizens have to split another 24-hour period between them, with the unfortunate lower 50m living in a way that is nasty, brutish, and — quite literally — short.

几天前，我跟中国的风险投资家李开复(Kai-Fu Lee)共进晚餐。他跟我讲起了一本有趣的反乌托邦科幻小说《北京折叠》(Folding Beijing)，不久前这本书被译成英文，很快获得了雨果奖(Hugo Award)最佳短中篇小说奖。这本书讲的是一个过于拥挤、严格按照阶层划分的首都。在北京，第一等居民享受正常的24小时时间，第二等和第三等的居民不得不分用另外24小时的时间，其中悲惨的5000万底层人口过着一种邋遢、恶劣的生活，并且拥有的时间更短。

Why do I mention this? Because I have been thinking a lot about how the major economic vectors of our time — technology-driven job destruction, wage stagnation, and political polarisation — will play out in both the US and China over the next few years. Lee, who helped launch Google in China and has invested in many of the country’s top start-ups, made a strong case that the Chinese were better positioned for the 21st century digital economy than America because the government could, as Mark Zuckerberg would put it, move fast and break things.

我为何要讲这件事?因为我一直在思考这样一个问题：我们这个时代的主要经济矢量，包括技术驱动的就业破坏、工资停滞和政治两极分化，未来几年里将在美中两国造成什么样的影响?李开复帮助谷歌(Google)启动了中国业务，他还投资了中国一些顶级的创业型企业。他提出了一个强有力的观点，即中国搞21世纪数字经济的条件比美国有利，因为中国政府善于——借用马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)的话来说——“快速行动，破除陈规”。

Already, the Chinese are plowing ahead with mass data gathering in smart cities; citizens' privacy will of course suffer but the algorithms will be richer as a result. Stem cell ethics? What stem cell ethics? China’s massive consumer market and its continued growth potential will make it possible to develop a digital ecosystem that might exist quite profitability and independently from the West, with home grown brands like Xiaomi and Huawei already connecting the dots up through the digital supply chain to the consumer.

中国人已开始在智慧城市开展大数据收集工作;公民的隐私当然会受到损害，但算法也将因此变得更加丰富。干细胞伦理?什么干细胞伦理?巨大的消费市场，以及持续的增长潜力，将使中国有可能发展出一套颇具经济效益且独立于西方的数字生态系统，目前小米(Xiaomi)和华为(Huawei)等一些本土品牌已把数字供应链与消费者连接起来。

“The question in the future will be why buy a Western brand?” said Lee, something that’s mirrored in a recent FT Confidential Research survey. “I think you’ll see China owning the digital ecosystem not only at home, but also in ASEAN and many Middle Eastern countries.”

“未来有一个问题是，还有什么理由购买西方品牌?”李开复说。这跟英国《金融时报》旗下《投资参考》(FT Confidential)近期的一份报告提到的问题类似。“我认为，你将看到中国不但在国内、而且在东盟(ASEAN)和许多中东国家拥有数字生态系统。”

China still struggles with all the same disruptive issues that the US does: income inequality, a skills gap, and the need for educational reform to train a 21st century digital workforce. The question is whether being a command and control economy will make the country too brittle to navigate this evolution, or, conversely, give it the power to move through a period of job destruction and avoid the middle-income trap. In Folding Beijing, the government creates faux jobs for low level workers to maintain social stability. In real life, both China and the US will have to figure out how to create more of the real thing.

中国仍在艰难应对跟美国相同的颠覆性问题：收入不平等、技能短缺，以及必须实施教育改革以培养适应21世纪数字经济的劳动队伍。问题在于，指令和控制型的经济是将让中国变得过于脆弱、乃至无法驾驭这种变迁，还是刚好相反，将给予中国一种力量、让它安然度过一段就业破坏的时期并避免落入中等收入陷阱?在《北京折叠》中，政府为底层劳动者创造了虚假的工作岗位，以维持社会稳定。在现实生活中，中国和美国都将不得不思考如何创造更多的真实岗位。