This essay has first been published on mycountryandmypeople.org in a long version using the 90ies animation series Captain Planet and the Planeteers as a starting point to look into globalism and nationalism in an era when our post WWII world order is clearly dissolving and a new one seem to be emerging. It looks into China’s fishing and energy industry and it asks what Xi Jinping will have to do during the next few years if he is our 21st century super hero.
 
Our World One Dream | 我们的世界梦。
 
If Xi Jinping is the Captain Planet who has taken over the bridge of spaceship Earth as many think, then I would have a few recommendations for policy priorities during the next five years.

1. Transform the China Dream | 中国梦 into a World Dream 世界梦 and make clear to everybody that we have only one world, which is all our home.
2. Change the Chinese Socialist Core Value | 中国社会主义核心价值观propaganda to a World Pragmatist Core Value | 世界实用主义核心价值观propaganda
3. Transition from an industrial growth system to an integral growth system, which creates abundance instead of scarcity.
4. Initiate a landslide transformation from an industrial education model to an integral education model, setting Chinese students free from the competitive drudgery of excessively acquiring cognitive skills and making space and time for the playful acquisition of collaborative social skills.
5. Convert all military forces into planeteers to clean up the debris already created and prevent future degradation of natural resources.
6. Allocate national defense and homeland security spending to environmental protection.
7. Change slogans from Happy National Day – Wishing the Motherland a Future of Unlimited Bliss to Happy World Day – Wishing our Planet a Future of Unlimited Bliss.
8. Take the lead with implementing a universal income based on social and environmental contributions to the global ecosystem.
   

The Urgency for Transition and Captain Xi’s Responsibility
 
Now, some readers – if they have made it so far – might think I am nuts; but be assured I am all sober and my recommendations to Captain Xi do only reflect the facts of a world in peril. Pax Americana created after WWII abundance for much of the Western world, but at the expense of the developing world and the environment. Pax Sinica is set to develop abundance for the sinocentric world at the expense of the Western world and the environment, but at a much larger and thus threatening scale considering the increase in consumption per capita and roughly one billion more human beings being added to this planet each decade, in particular in Asia and Africa, China’s second continent.
 
Damien Ma and William Adams captured this resource driven perspective well in the title of their 2013 book In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade. What they describe is a China which is at the center of an economic system which circulates around commodity and utility streams geared towards profit maximization; a system which in the words of yet another economist, F. E. Schumacher, does not operate as if people or other forms of life mattered. The world will thus continue to spin driven by the same profit driven economic system which the US has globalized; only the decision makers at the very top have changed.

Sinica hosts Kaiser Guo and Jeremy Goldkorn had in September FT journalist Lucy Hornby and Greenpeace East Asia Senior Climate & Energy Policy Officer Li Shuo as guests to discuss China’s environmental headaches and their impact on the world with a focus on distant water fishing and soil pollution. The crucial question in summarizing this podcast episode is this: Why has distant water fishing declared a strategic industry by the Chinese government, although it is not an obvious choice like industrial robotics, artificial intelligence or space exploration? I will try to explain here why.
 
Lucy Hornby tracks down the global squid fishing industry, which has its global center, where, you guess, in China, yes, in a Zhejiang coastal city called Zhoushan, not far from Ningbo. And she does so because squid is the latest and one of the last resources in the oceans to be exploited by humans after many maritime populations like mackerel or hake have collapsed in the past few decades, and many more are doomed to follow, because of the Chinese elite’s craving for political pole position and the world’s hunger for fish.
 
Zhoushan and Qingdao are the two largest Chinese and global fishing industry locations; Zhoushan accounting for 70% of the current global squid caught and Qingdao being home to the world’s largest seafood processing industry. Once rich waters of the Chinese coast have been emptied in the 90s and Chinese fishermen have to sail ever further if they don’t want to return empty handed, creating a vicious cycle of having to haul back increasing amounts of fish to pay for the increasing costs of long journeys to distant waters. What strikes me though as most important in Hornby’s account is the clear connection of all three industry sectors and the impact of a short sighted, profit focused, commodity based economic system on the entire value chain of a national economy, which shapes the 21st century like no other.
 
Although the act of fishing extracts natural resources from water bodies, it is considered part of the primary sector, i.e. agriculture. The impact of the primary sector on the secondary and tertiary sector is far from obvious, in particular for Western observers, who are used to less than two percent of the labor force being active in agriculture. Despite China still employing about 40% of its labor force in the primary sector, Hornby’s account shows incisively that our economic systems depend entirely on natural resources and cannot be sustained without them.
 
The excessive extraction of natural resources from oceans has led according to Greenpeace to critical conditions in more than 90% of commercially exploited fish stock. Despite this obvious depletion of natural maritime resources, the commodity based economic system which China has adopted in the 1980s, forces the central and provincial governments to subsidize the fishing industry in order to sustain employment in related secondary and tertiary sector industries; instead of slowing down, the exploitation is stepped up in the name of national stability, i.e. greed for power and profit.
 
China goes even so far as to declare distant water fishing a strategic industry, because it deems itself as new global hegemon entitled to exploit the entire planet’s international waters. Conflicts over the Diaoyu (Chinese for fishing) Islands, which erupted with Japan in 2012 and have been only the start of unavoidable conflicts with a nation that has to fuel its insatiable economic system on a scale that mankind has never seen before.
 
These take aways clarify why it is Captain Xi’s responsibility to initiate within this five-year legislation period a transition towards a new economic model which is not based on profit and scarcity, but on value and abundance; an economic model which I call in association with Ken Wilber’s integral metatheory, the integral model, because

1. it does not exclude, but includes all spheres of the global ecosystem;
2. it takes externalities into account and it thus based on deep system awareness;
3. it perceives the diversity of human resources as the most important natural resources to manage a turnaround and focuses on these rather than on commodities;
4. and it includes externalities into market prices.
   

Energy Security and Peace
 
Hornby’s FT article does also allow conclusions further down the value chain. Provincial and municipal subsidies for large scale infrastructure projects like Zhoushan’s multibillion CNY fishing harbor, national subsidies to the shipbuilding and steel industry, and the imminent threat to lay off literally millions of workers in the coal mining industry, do reveal that the Chinese economy is – like all industrial growth systems - sick to the marrow and grows only at the expense of the global ecosystem. Never before though did a national economy reach scope and scale of China’s and never before was a single economy of this size connected to a global market of mindless consumers. That’s why 21st century dynamics are reason to worry; and that’s why both top down as well as bottom up transformation is required urgently.
 
China’s energy policy should give us particular reason to worry, because it is one which sets its own and thus the global economy on track for the next 20 to 50 years and thus entails Beijing’s most far sighted measures. China’s current reliance on coal, accounting for 2/3 of its national energy generation and its initiated shift to nuclear energy, which the central government labels as renewable (!), clearly indicate that there is no intention to collaborate with ROW in terms of energy security. A focus on nuclear energy reflects in any nation a deeply centralized and nationalist governance attitude, since it is based on the very premise of being independent from others, while a focus on solar energy reflects the visualization of a transnational future, where the sun, as our original source of energy is harvested and distributed globally.

The World Nuclear Association writes in its September 2017 report that in China, now with 38 operating reactors on the mainland, the country is well into the growth phase of its nuclear power program. There were eight new grid connections in 2015, and five in 2016. Over 20 more reactors are under construction, including the world's first Westinghouse AP1000 units, and a demonstration high-temperature gas-cooled reactor plant. Many more units are planned, including two largely indigenous designs – the Hualong One and CAP1400. China aims to have more nuclear capacity than any country except the USA and France by 2020 and to lead nuclear power generation globally by 2030.  A past, a fading and an emerging empire on nuke steroids; confirming what Karl Popper wrote after WWII in Utiopa and Violence: The spirit of Hitlerism won its greatest victory over us when, after its defeat, we used the weapons which the threat of Nazism had induced us to develop.
 
A quick look into the history books tells us that a joint energy security is one if not the central pillar for regional peace. One might today look critical upon the European Union for having stalled its development due to bureaucratic futilism, but we shall not forget that it is the result of a concerted effort to avoid the recurrence of destruction WWII brought upon Europe. The EU was erected on the basis of the 1951 Treaty of Paris, which entailed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). French post WWII foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed a union of energy and heavy industry commodity supply as a central measure to guarantee regional peace.  

If there were only one measure I could recommend to Captain Xi, it would be forging a regional energy security treaty with Japan and Korea in a first step and in a second the successive transformation of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) project into a distributed energy generation and energy consumption network. China’s abundant solar resources in Tibet, Xinjiang and Dongbei are combined with the Chinese manufacturing power the key to trigger a breakthrough in a change of energy supply from fossil fuel based economies to renewables. A breakthrough, which can only work if energy supply is conceived supranational or even global. Captain Xi would thereby guarantee a peaceful future for the Eurasian and African continents and could find his way into the history books of future generations as the leader who saved the world. He would most likely share the 2030 Peace Nobel Price with Elon Musk who has a similar project in mind for the Americas.
 
Follow up reading:

• In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade by Damien Ma and William Adams
• China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard French
• China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the Silk Road by Tom Miller
• China’s Asia Dream by Knut Wimberger
• A bigger catch: China’s fishing fleet hunts new ocean targets by Lucy Hornby
• 5 Problems with China’s Distant Water Fishing Industry by Li Shuo
• Greenpeace Briefing on Distant Water Fishing
• Saving the Oceans short documentary on ARTE program Mapping the World
• World Nuclear Power Association on Nuclear Power in China
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers by Knut Wimberger
  

Green Initiatives director Nitin Dani asks tomorrow What Does it Take to Get the Healthiest Workplace in the World? And invites several speaker to answer at Shanghai’s Haworth Furniture. I happen to listen to Guy Raz this morning on the TED Radiohour moderating the episode Citizen Science on how ordinary citizen march into hitherto academic and corporate turf to develop solutions needed in society, and am this prompted to give a shot at answering his question.

MIT media design lab director Joi Ito explains in the TED radiohour how concerned citizens joined a bottom-up innovation movement after the 2011 earthquake in Japan and its subsequent nuclear crisis to develop radioactivity measurement hardware. The resulting platform safecast is a monument for how innovation emerges in the forth quadrant, so called by Stephen Johnson in his bestseller, Where Good Ideas Come From? Innovation does not anymore exclusively take place in corporations or government owned research institutions; it has left the top down organization structure and is being distributed through the internet to ordinary citizens, who show genuine concern for solutions.

Ito’s 2014 TED talk makes me recall an older one by innovation expert Charles Leadbeater. He explained already in 2009 how collaborative creativity changes the way we innovate and asks how do we will organize ourselves without organization? He shows how the internet facilitates a transition from mere consumers to innovative users, and shares his research on the rise of pro-ams, i.e passionate amateurs who act like professionals. It is these people, I believe, who will catalyze innovation which creates the healthiest workplaces in the world.

And there is yet another memory crossing my mind while thinking of an answer to Nitin’s question. On a wind-down-day at the coast of Pran Buri in 2015 we watched Crystal Voyager and parts of The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun with surfer legend George Greenough. George "The Mat" is probably exemplifying the passionate man going his own way. Sure, he is a wealthy parents' offspring and can afford to do whatever he pleases, but he chooses a life which does not follow the Maslow hierarchy of needs. He does not conform to the earthly desires of status, peer pressure, to what society considers normal. He follows his passion in every aspect of life and by doing that turns into a surfer, philosopher and engineer. George is credited with being the best mat surfer on planet and with inventing surf board fins. He is moreover a pioneer of water photography and built his own unsinkable sailing boat. He designed, invented and engineered out of pure fun.

What stroke me is how his life style seems to have inspired Pink Floyd. The creators of "we don't need no education" must have seen in George the living proof of their claims about institutionalized education and named one of their albums after his legendary surfing documentary. Pink Floyd’s claims which have been confirmed by modern neuroscience, e.g. in the documentary Alphabet where neurologist Gerald Hüther says: you can't force man to learn, you can only inspire him to make his own efforts. The same is true for all purposeful innovation, which arises out of inner necessity of a curious mind at play.

Swiss psychoanlyst C. G. Jung knew this. He said that the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves. In as such we will create the healthiest workplaces in the world in Stephen Johnson’s forth quadrant, i.e. in the non-market & networked innovation space, where mindful consumers and curious users play with their environment to find solutions for a better tomorrow.

Demain | Tomorrow (2015) by Cyril Dion is one of the best environmental documentaries I have seen so far; Cyril Dion tells with a team of friends and the help of interviewed experts the story behind the global environmental destruction in five chapters: agriculture, energy, economy, democracy, and education; but it does not stop here, it gives in each field best practices of how we can with local initiatives manage a turn around. Permaculture and agroecology instead of industrial farming; distributed renewable energy instead of centralized fossil fuels; Iceland's constitutional change to bring democracic systems back into the control of citizens; Finland's integral education system focusing on the individual child instead of industrial education with centralized exams and a focus PISA results in maths, natural science and language skills.

Dion manages to turn the film into a positive vision for our species' future despite all the negative messages by interviewed experts. Tony Barnosky, Harvard paleontologist tells us at minute 4:00 that we don't have a lot of time, maybe 20 years to move things into the right direction. Belgian law professor and UN rapporteur Olivier de Schuetter explains at minute 30:25 that small scale farming could solve all problems of food production and environmental degradation, but nothing changes because governments listen to powerful corporations. American essayist Jeremy Rifkin enlightens with a very eloquent interview the effects of global warming, how it changes the water cycle on planet Earth and why we face the 6th mass extinction by 2035.  It is though Mary Clear and Pam Warhurst from the Incredible Edible movement in Great Britain's Todmorden who seems to have at minute 16:50 the very central answer to all the problems humanity faces: “That's all the future needs; more people connecting with each other; food and conversation is the answer.”

We certainly need a positive narrative for our common future; its probably the single most important element for defining a strategy to manage a turnaround of this scale; since it wont be enough like John Kotter wrote in his famous management booklet Our Iceberg is Melting to define a tiger team and then engage the penguin population to look for a new iceberg. There is only one planet and we can’t look for another one. Space X is not an alternative. I therefore can't agree more with Rob Hopkins, founder of the British Transition Network, who says at minute 6:35 that “Its fascinating how we craft narratives about our extinction and demise, but we are incapable to develop positive visions. We don’t have the stories that go with cutting emissions by 8, 9, 10% a year. People think that we will sit then in caves and eat rotten potatoes; but it could be actually fantastic. On that note, I recommend Leo Lionni’s children book Frederik, which shows how cool it could be sitting together in caves, telling each other stories and sharing what we have or Michael Ende’s novel Momo, which has the same issue at heart: spending more time with people instead of with things brings about a different kind of growth.  

On this note, a kind warning to the US film industry, which churns out year after year increasingly dystopian movies, making itself an accomplice of destruction. Huge budgets are allotted to fill our minds and hearts with narratives of destruction and narcissism. The 2017 blockbuster Ghost in a Shell, featuring Scarlett Johansson, just to name one of many examples, was produced for a whooping USD 110 Million; but the L.A. metropolitan area has no functioning public transportation system, permanent traffic jams, an antiquated electricity network, no high speed long distance railway. The highly productive US film industry reflects that a society, which once was a manufacturing powerhouse, has slid into a virtual void. Instead of building state of the art infrastructure, it designs negative delusions; instead of building our homes and caring for our people, we spend our hours on Netflix, HBO and gaming.

We watched the documentary Demain in combination with with climate scientist Alice Bows Larkin's TED talk on how we have to adapt to climate change or paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara's TED talk on the sixth mass extinction. Demain is in China online available with Chinese subtitles on the streaming platform bilibil. Highly recommended.

Further reading:

• Transition Network