New face of rich world
My trip to Hong Kong to celebrate the New Year 2011 was awakening of sorts. A city which seems to have the highest density of population also for sure looked very rich and looked neat and clean from everywhere. The infrastructure was superb and new constructions happening at every new space available. Whatever was available was well maintained and certainly was better than any infrastructure I have seen in US and Europe.
A Chinese professor who happened to meet us on the trip explained that why China is not pushing very hard on making English as the language which their population needs to learn if they have to develop. Rather, China will be the power centre where the world will be coming to work in future and they will have to learn Cantonese and Mandarin instead. His claims seemed to be very real. I could see a lot of expats in Hong Kong and was told that China is having a very large number of them with an increase every day.
It was also a very interesting fact to understand that over last two years the number of tourists top Hong Kong are from China and India. The change is evident as food joints seems to be serving Indian fare much more than what I saw five years back. I was surprised to find Tandoori dishes at Airport with authentic Indian taste. Europe and US travellers held the top slots earlier.
World order certainly seems to be changing. Year 2011 will be a challenging year for the world for various reasons. US and Europe, who are already advanced are seeing their economies slowing down. UK is looking at increasing taxes and costs of essential commodities are increasing. At the same time, UK is staring at job losses and stagnation of salaries for the lucky ones. This is similar to what countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain, France and many other European countries are facing today. This situation will affect the spending pattern of the general population and will result in even more job losses, crime and this cycle will continue unless there is some external help. The developed countries are being pushed back to a “developing” state while countries like China, India, Russia and Brazil are developing much faster than they ever had.
It is not wrong to say now, Asia is the emerging economic superpower and would be sustaining the rest of the world in decades to come.
