The Chinazon
Who would have thought that in the year of 2022 the era of “the power of the few” accelerated even further until 2030? Yet, with different implications in several categories.
In terms of governance and policies, governments became much more powerful and are able to overrule business decisions of large corporations. This shifted the decisive power in the market environment to governments especially in Asia and Africa. This was in particular initiated by the Covid pandemic in which governments rediscovered their execution power. However, this had different implications around the world. In Latin America, green parties sprouted and officials from those parties could secure more and more seats, increasing their power, in several elections. The most remarkable event was the election of a woman of the green party to serve as president of Brazil in October 2026. Yet, it has to be mentioned that the new authorities were militant forces, defending the nature with warfare. Europe and US showed a slightly increased governmental intervention to limit freedom of business operations, but nothing radically.
Regarding the environment, an exceptional act was the convention of China, the US, and the EU in 2023 to form a conglomerate (led by China) to buy the two biggest rainforests in the world (the Amazon and the Congo rainforest) to protect the “lunges of the world” as a mean for carbon sequestration. However, this erased all previous ambitions of international development organisations to give back or increase land rights of indigenous populations to foster equality improvements. In addition, exploitation continued for valuable resources, in particular lithium and cobalt to foster the accelerated battery fuelled electrification.
Further, market dynamics in underserved markets experienced a significant change. In Africa, the economic model of China became apparent across African countries. One cornerstone was that the regulatory unification of African countries saw a significant improvement. Further, supported by the governments, more and more young Africans were sent abroad to receive better education (US, Europe and Asia) with the obligations to come back afterwards and apply the knowledge in key organisations. Moreover, due to increasing relations between Africa and China, most governments learned how to value and protect their resources in order to foster domestic economic development. By doing so, African countries had the financial resources to make a significant elevation of the population that was living in extreme poverty possible. Yet, this was facilitated by low-skilled work.
Also unexpected was the development within the “Innovation space”, which encountered a significantly slowdown compared to 2022. This was mainly due to the increased power of governments and the interventions into market dynamics. Moreover, public institutions kept on being a slow-paced area. Yet, one area underwent a significant leapfrog - the surveillance systems. Those became more and more prevalent to stifle both climate harmful actions and equality-requesting civil movements. Moreover, governments significantly sponsored climate change mitigation technologies over the last decade, i.e. geoengineering, with first breakthroughs to limit climate impacts in areas of governmental officials and their relatives.
Unexpectable in 2021 but reality in 2030 is that religion does not play a meaningful role anymore and traditional, historic standpoints in terms of gender-equality were eradicated. In elite circles gender and race was no dividing force. This trickled down into society with improvements in gender equality. However, the distance between poor and rich kept in place. Related to education, the old regime of protecting the power for a few people implied that barriers were kept in place and no free educational availability around the world was made possible. Internet as a mean for free education was made more accessible across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the reach did not meet the initial plans of the United Nations back in 2020.
Sources
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202012/1211211.shtml
https://www.scielo.br/j/cint/a/yP3DvjQP85VvKtTjzbzRnFS/?format=pdf&lang=en
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59088498
https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-who-can-still-save-the-worlds-green-lung/a-59153451
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/07/02/is-china-buying-the-world-peter-nola/
https://www.canalrural.com.br/noticias/venda-terras-brasil-china-eua-europa/