Coping with the Velocity of Change

In an attempt to become more cultured, my wife and I have taken advantage of our Netflix subscription to order some award-winning documentaries. The first arrived last weekend: Up the Yangtze, a fascinating and beautiful film about the human impact of China's Three Gorges Dam. The 600 ft dam is the largest in the world, and the kind of gargantuan spectacle that China seems to love. While it will undoubtedly bring immense benefits to China, the dam's construction has been steeped in controversy for its environmental and human impact. Over 1 million people had to be relocated by the Chinese government.

This film depicts a China at a crossroads between its rural, traditional past and a cutting-edge future in a globalized world. It follows a cruise boat, staffed by young Chinese workers and catering to rich Western tourists, up the Yangtze River. This juxtaposition between cultures is mirrored in the settlements along the Yangtze. Poor villages that will soon be drowned coexist alongside the skyscrapers and blazing neon of Westernized cities. Progress, we see, is changing everyone and everything. Most Chinese are simply trying to hold on. One review perfectly captures the tone of the film in a single line: "As we watch the steadily rising water swallow more and more of the landscape, the film conveys an ominous sense of a society changing too fast in its stampede into an unknown future."

The film touches on broader questions of "progress." I am a believer in the power of globalization and economic development to eradicate poverty, promote security and cooperation, and improve the quality of life for people all over the world, but globalization has to be managed. Change--even for the better--always has costs. Some people profit from change. Others lose. This is every bit as true within America as it is in the world abroad. A key challenge for policymakers is to help globalization's losers adapt to a changing world. If they cannot adapt, their discontent can undermine the entire system. This challenge is compounded by the increasing velocity of change. Better technology, better methods of communication and transformation, and more competitive economies mean that change happens much faster now than in the past. The pace of development in China, for example, is truly astonishing. But as Up the Yangtze shows, that development has a human price tag. It's good to remember that.