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Archived Articles  Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian descent, and former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with the hot political and economic topics, both Bulgarian and international. ("A Royal Solution." World Press Review. June 1997, provides English versions). He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in the country, and in 1996-1997 participated in the international monitors' teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria. In 1999 he was among the few Bulgarian journalists that supported NATO military operation against Yugoslavia. In 2002 Simeon and his family emigrated from Bulgaria to Canada where they now live in Montreal, Quebec.
Global Real Estate Project
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China in the age of Internet
 Some want information; others want to prevent them from getting it Measuring the economic success of one particular country with the tons of steel and coal produced by its industries seems like a matter of past ages. But in fact it wasn't until the late 1960s that many people realized that some other yardsticks should be used in order to determine the real input of each and any country. The focus gradually shifted to the higher technologies, during the 1970s among those were the robots, in the 1980s the PCs, in the 1990s the Internet where it remains till now. A country without a strong presence in the global information network just can't claim any, even a moderate, role in the economic development of the world. Its goods and services won't be demanded because nobody will know about their existence, its cultural achievements won't be recognized because the large number of people won't even hear about them. This article deals in general with the way China tries to enter the world by investing heavily in the new information technologies making its people, economy, and culture easily identifiable by the surfing people from around the world.
The scope of adventureThere is still a myth in the western audience saying that the new modern China represents barely more than its coastal regions. Everything to the west of this line remains basically at the levels where Mao left it some 30 years ago. The facts show completely different picture. Rather than exception allowed only for chosen few, the phenomenal economic development of the last 25 years has touched almost all regions except the most remote western lands bordering India and Central Asia. If any one of the 30 or so Chinese provinces and autonomous regions was an independent country, 23 out of these 30 could have been among the best economic performers in terms of economic rates during this 25-year period. The foreign investments may be concentrated predominantly in the coastal areas but almost all they need in terms of resources comes from their neighboring western provinces. Thus the domino effect of development goes westward.
China as a textile sweatshopThe myth that China is nothing but a giant garment sweatshop plays very prominent role in the modern western mythology. Tens of millions impoverished Chinese sleeping in huge common dormitories just next door to their factories working as cheap as $4-6 a day and thus making miserable the life of their global competitors, that's usually what the western audience understands by Chinese economic model. To deny this phenomenon will be to deny the obvious, but to generalize it putting inside a 1.3-billion nation will also be a great mistake. People without any education and there are millions have no other option left than going to sweatshops, but people with good western-style education and they are millions too have more than enough opportunities. Recent survey in Canada showed that more than 20% of all Chinese immigrants preferred to return to China after obtaining some formal education in Canada. Obviously they won't go to the sweatshops. Most likely they will replace some of the millions of foreign specialists that are paid extraordinary by the Chinese standards salaries.
Looking far into futureVery good indicator as to how far in the future the Chinese society looks is the openness of the higher education and the investment this society is ready to make to educate its future generations. Very pleasant indeed is to see China trying to emulate the American university system in everything including the convocation dresses for the graduates. Almost any university I've seen on the Web, even far away from the eastern coastline, offers positions for English-speaking professors, some as instructors of English, some as instructors in specific fields of the science. The Chinese society accepts to pay thousands of dollars to foreign professors because it needs millions of new specialists using the western technologies and know-how. Clearly Beijing sees the current situation of being center of the world sweatshop industries as just a temporary period.
Internet undermines the old systemThe way one particular government treats the Internet shows clearly his priorities. In countries like North Korea it's nonexistent, in some others like Cuba or some Arab countries it's barely tolerated to a degree that most of the population is left outside of the global information stream. In China the Internet users, that were virtually inexistent till the very end of 1999, have already almost reached 100 million by the beginning of 2005, which represents a stable increase of some 20 million for any of the previous 5 years. The government desperately tries to filter the information that may reach the final users but anyone familiar with the system knows how difficult it is in reality. Communicating freely without government sanction is something that puts the old political system in a very difficult situation. Using code words millions of Chinese can exchange freely information outside the official channels. The communists lose gradually the monopoly over the information. The Eastern European experience shows that losing this monopoly is the first necessary step toward the system dismantlement.
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See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of China.
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