Welcome back from your holidays. I'm happy that so many of you took on the challenge offered by our sponsor the Chinese Communist Party - and just to recap, I asked you to work on the following assignment:
How should China deal with the 180mio 15-29 year old men brimming with testosterone and in the idealistic age where they want to change the world?
And I gave you some boundaries, since we don't want negative social utility associated with the solution:
(1) Don't do lasting damage to the environment
(2) Don't consume non-renewable resources
(3) Don't consume non-domestic resources
(4) Don't allow them to be too united
And importantly (5): project should be self-financing, so women and the older generation are not forced to share their rice, figuratively speaking, although that sacrifice may be done if the pressure is of sufficient force.
Before I send your papers to our sponsor, I thought I would recap some of your recommendations, with my marks. Don't be discouraged by those, it's not a simple equation to solve!
Now, some of you have suggested solutions actually carried out by regimes of the past :
1. Build Pyramids or Great Walls (no, fails on 5)
2. Conduct limited warfare (no, fails on 1 and 5 - and possibly 4)
3. Educate them in large numbers (no, fails on 4 in a big way)
4. Force a religion upon them (no, also fails on 4, but not bad)
5. Send them abroad to conquer new worlds (not bad, actually)
I commend you on your knowledge of history, and at least nobody suggested a Ramses II inspired solution. But you have overlooked the fact that the numbers we are solving for are several orders of magnitude higher than they were in the past, and what worked for 100,000 individuals will not be manageable for 180,000,000.
Re 2: I said you should not be discouraged by my marks; well, one of China's finest political thinkers of the modern era Deng Xiao Ping was of course the father of the one-child policy, and once remarked that "now that is has been implemented, I don't have to invade Siberia." Dip your stick in that remark, sir. Even if he had attempted this - and one must assume his Russian counterpart would encourage a manageable skirmish for exactly the same reasons - it would not have addressed the numbers and it would as a minimum have left an ugly splodge of grease on Mongolia.
I must admit these rather myopic suggestions made me chuckle:
6. Build toys and electronic goods for the clients of credit card companies in the West and in the process pick up vast amounts of IOUs in their currencies. Declare that to be rich is glorious. (NO, fails on 1, 2, 3, and 4, although 5 makes up for some of this damage. It does scale well, though, and has had some success for a decade or two. Deng was evidently not a tree-hugger).
7. Put lots and lots of the young thugs in a uniform, and let them bully their younger brethren. One peasant in a uniform is one less on the street within spitting distance of a pitchfork. (No, fails on 5, but more emphatically on the numbers: the Chinese army currently numbers 3,000,000, and that is but a drop in the ocean. Besides, the rest of the world would not be all that impressed if China grew the army to a relevant proportion of the 180mio).
8. Build regional baseball leagues; fans are by nature loyal to their own teams, and will therefore have other out-groups to oppose than the state government (ok, I get that, and I have never heard of a group of football hooligans overthrowing a government, so maybe it has a lot going for it. Hey, maybe the rest of society may even enjoy the games so it would satisfy all 5 boundaries. But it doesn't feel right - or maybe I just don't care for baseball).
Some of the most exciting and truly scaleable suggestions are based in the virtual world made possible by recent technological advances. In no particular order:
9. Introduce a countrywide monthly Tetris competition with grand prizes (nice, but may create too many sulking losers)
10. Give away free iPhones preset to transmit historical Chinese soap operas (nice, but what about 3 and 5? Still, very scaleable)
11. Give all boys a free Lenovo desktop computer with a preset login to Second Life (spot on, in my opinion)
I believe the next generation of testosterone taming political initiatives will be found among those ideas although more work is required.
Finally, and perhaps I am unduly influenced by a recent trip down the YangTze River, I want to mention this suggestion:
12. Engage them to clean up the country, to re-plant trees, to learn the science and equip them with the tools required to clean the rivers, filter the air, recycle the mountains of styrofoam lunchboxes (optically it fails on 5, but in truth it is a very good investment for generations to come.)
I want to thank you all for sharing your imaginative ideas, and welcome you back to campus for the last push.
