He could be a teenager in any American high school. He loves to "play Xbox." He hates to do his homework, and when a visiting journalist asks what his dreams are, he responds simply, "I want to be rich."

No, he's not an American student. He's enrolled in Beijing's High School 101, where his candid declaration of financial ambition brings a demure giggle from his classmates. Yet many of them will tell you in so many words that they want the same thing. They might even quote a line often attributed to the late reformer Deng Xiaoping: "To get rich is glorious."

This is the new China, where capitalism has been enlisted into the service of communism.

You can see it and hear it in the way a self-described "nerd" like Kai-fu Lee, former president of Google Greater China and founder of Microsoft Research Asia, is greeted like a rock star by the sportswear-clad high school kids at Beijing High School 101.

You can hear it in the ambitious motto -- "One world, one market" -- of Alan Guo, also known as Guo Quji in Chinese, 34. He founded Lightinthebox.com, which ships just about everything from tools and gadgets to wedding dresses anywhere in the world overnight.

I talked to Lee and Guo at Innovation Works, a small business incubator designed to provide in Beijing what Silicon Valley provides in northern California, a place for computer-related start-up businesses to find expertise and capital resources to grow bigger.

With graduate degrees from Stanford and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Guo says he was inspired by Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," a best-selling exploration of how technology is introducing greater democracy and breaking down economic and corporate barriers for developing countries like China and India.

"When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home," Deng once said, "you will see how China will transform itself." China is indeed transforming itself, and that stirs a mixture of hope and dread in Americans, especially in these times of high joblessness and high American anxiety about China as an emerging superpower.

As a guy who was raised in Cold War America, the dazzling ease with which communist China has accommodated capitalism is hard for me to fathom, but I was there to learn. I was invited by the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Chinese Americans organized by architect I.M. Pei to encourage better understanding between our two countries.

How well do we know each other? Not well. Last year a Gallup poll found 40 percent of Americans over 18 thought China was "the leading economic power in the world today." Only 10 percent thought so in 2000. In fact, our gross domestic product is more than three times that of China, although China has been growing fast and investing well, including its purchase of much of America's debt.

Accepting the Committee of 100's invitation meant that I appeared on a panel to discuss what we Americans think of China, then spent the rest of the week learning what the Chinese think about us.

My biggest surprise was how little today's China resembles the old Cold War stereotype of a communist regime. Capitalism has taken hold in a bonanza-land fashion. The fact that communists happen to be regulating it is treated in polite conversation as an inconvenience or a marginal benefit, depending on whether the regime happens to be subsidizing a particular enterprise or restricting it.

The government's human rights abuses are well known. Yet, since Deng's lifting of market restrictions and bans against capitalists joining the Communist Party, such abuses are more rare than they used to be. Besides, if you play your cards in a politically correct fashion, you can make money without going anywhere near those controversies.

And making money is the new engine of China's development, whether the moneymaking occurs because of China's regime or in spite of it. As Kai-fu Lee observes, China's entrepreneurial environment is still in its formative stage. It doesn't have the deep bench of experienced managers and coaches and venture capitalists.

Yet if the young entrepreneurs I met offer a glimpse of China's future, they have a lot more in common with their American counterparts than they have in competition. It is not hard to imagine today's enterprising young in both nations accomplishing something their ancestors never could: bringing a new peace and prosperity that can close gaps beneath rich and poor in both nations. We can only hope.

 

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(c) 2009, Clarence Page