I was recently privileged to be invited to give the keynote speech to the graduating class of 2011 at the Suzhou-Singapore International School. Two charming and pleasant young ladies, 11th graders, showed me around the school before the graduation ceremony last week Friday afternoon. I’d never been to the new, much larger school before, and was surprised how huge, populated and busy the School was. I was also surprised how largely Asian the School was, as well. I’ve had and have Western friends who send their children to the School, and simply presumed the school population was more heterogenous. That said, my tour guides before the graduation program were from Australia and Malaysia. Of course, the school has a large South Korean population – nearly 40%, I’ve heard said. Of course, there were a lot of Singaporeans, as well as a smattering of Japanese. Westerners seemed about 20% of the make-up of the school, split between Americans and Europeans.
The ceremony was charming and inspiring. I haven’t been to a graduation in years, and found the speakers – faculty and students – thoughtful and funny. Of course, I didn’t get some of the inside jokes, as I don’t know the schooling system and the international certifications for which they have to work so hard to acquire.
After the ceremony, during the mixer, an American who seemed new to the scene echoed a thought I had while reading the program for the day. Inserted into the simple bi-fold was a list of ALL the universities to which the graduating seniors had been accepted. As students accepted their diplomas from the headmaster and received a shake from the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the school the master of ceremonies called out the name of the college or university the student would be attending. Easily 95% of the students were going on to University. The American with whom I’d chatted after the ceremony noted that in the States the usual number of people going on to 4-year school is about 30% – less in some parts of the country.
Nevertheless, all the students whom I met and with whom I chatted were shy, self-effacing and gracious – even if they were going on to Cambridge the following academic year.
You’ll find a transcript of the keynote speech I delivered at the ceremony, which seemed to have gone over well with students, faculty and parents alike.
Many of you are probably wondering who I am and why I am speaking today. Someone jokingly told me the School had originally invited President Barak Obama. However, he was unable to attend. Disappointed, one of the School staff saw me walking down a Suzhou street a few weeks back and figured, “He’ll do!”; though, they did admit later, they would have preferred a stand-in for the president who had a full head of hair.
I need to ask you all an important question: what are you going to do TODAY about the 150 million people within a day’s drive north of here who do not have enough water to drink, cook with or farm with? The largest drought in more than 50 years in Shandong province will turn China into a net importer of grain for the first time ever in its history. In Zhoushan, near Ningbo, just a two hour drive from here, people only have access to water five hours each day. The first and second largest lakes in China are becoming grasslands and mud flats, putting millions of Chinese fishermen out of work. Water levels were so low in Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces last year that 90% of hydroelectric dams in the region were shut down.
You all, the graduating class of 2011, are what I call the Tipping Point class. The Tipping Point is the threshold beyond which great events come together to define people and societies. You are at the threshold of an adult world fraught with some of the greatest challenges ever faced by humankind. It will be up to your generation to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities the future will present us all.
In my book, China Inside out: 10 Irreversible Trends Reshaping China and its Relationship with the World, I talk about how China is at the LEADING EDGE OF HISTORY. Now, what does that mean, LEADING EDGE OF HISTORY? It means that though China may be amongst the first to experience these environmental and resource pressures, MOST OF THE REST OF THE WORLD IS FOLLOWING IN ITS PATH.
The CFO of microchip maker Intel recently asked me over dinner in Chengdu what I thought the most critical trends are right now at work molding China and affecting all our societies. I told him and the executives at the table there were FOUR trends in particular:
- the rapid development of China’s middle class;
- increased pollution of the land, water and air;
- ballooning resource consumption rates;
- and a rapidly aging population.
The rapid rise of China’s middle class approach to consumption and the society’s massive use of natural resources is based in a model 250 years old, called the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution model assumes that the earth has an infinite amount of natural resources to take out of the ground to be made into products; another Industrial Revolution axiom is that we have an infinite amount of air into which to blow our carbon dioxide when burning coal for electricity; the world view assumes we have an infinite amount of water with which to irrigate our farms, manufacture our products and drive our power plants, amongst other presumptions of about the wealth of the earth.
Five days ago in Shanghai, I explained to a group of top executives from TOTAL, a French energy group that whereas about 600 million people in the West have been happily consuming and polluting the last sixty years; now – if we include India – another 3 billion people are rushing into the party. It is THE SPEED OF THE RUSH AND THE SIZE OF THE CROWD coming assuming modernity that have created this Tipping Point in human history. The rapid modernization of China has compressed into 30 years major environmental and social issues that took the West 250 YEARS to arrive at. China though – because it has so many people on a relatively small amount of land with few natural resources of its own remaining – has rushed past the West into the future. And make no mistake: other countries are following behind.
America, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and others are beginning to grapple with the issues I’ve described. I hope this generation graduating today will consider the challenges posed to the members of their society – and to their families – and consider the opportunities that are opening up that intend to build a better world.
Great opportunities are opening in energy production industries like wind power, solar power, coal gasification, biofuels and even nuclear power: materials engineers, civil engineers, safety inspectors, environmental lawyers, biochemists and geneticists will increasingly be in demand. Energy efficiency policies in China and throughout Asia will create new industries in the building construction sector: in materials development, sustainable living architecture, and in heating and ventilation self-sufficiency, in gray water treatment and more. China in particular will develop institutions that for the first time in its long history will care for the elderly, the disabled, and those made redundant after all the cities are built and the roads laid, to help them many of them feel – if not actually become – useful and valued citizens of their societies.
I will finish with the story of a young Chinese woman, someone I am proud to call a friend of mine. She is a professional, born and raised in Shanghai, who works in a British professional services firm. When she turned 25 years old two years ago, she threw a special birthday party for her friends. She invited more than two hundred young Chinese professionals – and myself – to the party, which she hosted in a renovated warehouse on Suzhou Creek. She told the guests in her invitation that she did not want us to give her gifts for her birthday. Instead, she wanted us to donate at least 100rmb each to her favorite charity: the ONE EGG A DAY foundation, which would take the money to buy eggs to provide children in the poorest villages in China the only protein many of them would have each day.
She also invited eight other Chinese charities to the event and gave them space and time to display the services and products they offered, all of which helped the Chinese people who were not as fortunate as she, and to help the society at large to help those the government was not able to support. By the end of the evening, she had raised more than 32,000 rmb.
THIS YOUNG LADY WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS OLDER THAN THOSE OF YOU GRADUATING TODAY. I challenge any of you to contribute as much or more to society during your entire lifetimes as this young lady did in one evening of enlightenment.
I challenge you, Class of 2011, to do more than consider narrow career options for your future, to look outward from the protective cocoons of adolescence you are leaving to consider the issues our world, our societies and our families are increasingly confronted with. I challenge the Tipping Point graduates to make this a better, cleaner, safer world than the one into which you had been born.
Personally, I cannot think of a generation better equipped than the group sitting before me: international in outlook and experience; technologically savvy; related to each other and to a foreign environment through a sophisticated network of adaptation. You all, like my Shanghai friend, have it within each of you to become leaders in your own societies or even in foreign lands.
And if there is anything the future will require of us all, it is leadership of a different kind, in a world we can scarcely imagine.
Thank you.
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