You don't understand what is meant by '30 years'. Here I am talking about social changes. Chinese cities can have tall buildings and modern metros but still plenty of petty and unruly people. You cannot expect these people to change. Not if they experienced the Cultural Revolution. Not if they were Red Guards. Not after age of 10. 30 years define a full generation. My Chinese students/interns/colleagues born after 1990 are great. Not so for the older ones. They belong to a different era. They had to struggle and be more self-protective and it shows in their more self-centered behaviors. I don't suggest that majority of them don't try to adapt and be more civil-minded because they know time has changed and/or they don't want to get locked by for 5 days. In the end, you can't teach new tricks to old dogs. In another 30 years the teenagers then will probably sneer at us for not recycle a tiny piece of paper or use a plastic bag and they would be right. Even a few years ago when I visited Taipei last, I had to use the chopsticks provided by the restaurant when everyone else brought their own.
I don't. You talk about social progress and political progress and then environmental consciousness. These topics by itself are already too broad. But you tried to combine all of these topics to depict a picture. I just want to point out some of what you said that I disagree with.
These 30 years cannot be accelerated with money or even hard work but as I wrote, Mother Nature ensures this problem will automagically disappear in 30 years time. You can fit anyone in a Brioni suit but don't expect them to suddenly start ordering dry martinis shaken but not stirred. It is really not a 'fixable problem' rather a 'process'.
People in Taiwan complain a lot. People in the U.S. complain all the time. They 'flee' everywhere for better opportunities too. Are they poor? No. They simply have choices, freedom to do so, and most importantly of all, they know they are empowered to do so. Go check CIA World Book, Taiwan's quality of live has been right in between Germany and Iceland for years now. Taiwan is a place where one in four families has a live-in domestic worker and they never have to worry one second about their health for their entire lives. Talk (a.k.a complaints) is cheap, look at the numbers. A lot of people complain not because their current situation is bad but because they have high expectations for themselves and that is a very good silver lining. Per capita, the number of people in the Arts field in Taiwan is 5X that of China, most of these artists and writers will never accumulate much material wealth but they are doing what they want to do and they add to the richness of a society far more than a coal mine owner with a gold-plated toilet.
Drinking martinis is a progress for someone but might not be a progress for the others. How do we define what is a progress or what isn't a progress.
They do have a choice that is why they choose to flee. Taiwan has one of the highest net migration in all developed economies. That says a lot of quality of live in Taiwan. Taiwan has fallen behind Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong in every metric. That means for the last few decades, Taiwan is a failure.
Many Hong Kongers hire domestic helpers even though their apartment is less than 400 sq feet. It is a good thing that people can choose to pursue their interests even if it lowered their quality of living. However, unless you want to go back to live in the Pre-industrial society, then those coal miners, steel workers and oil workers are the foundation of the modern society. They might not have added richness to the society but without them there wouldn't be a modern society to begin with.
You may not agree with the current political situation in Taiwan but if you study how smoothly and how peacefully Taiwan has transitioned in the last 30 years, you'll wish the same can happen in China someday (not in 30 years). Forget about China, contrast Taiwan's experience with that of South Korea where hundred got killed during the transition and EVERY President except one went to prison or died of unnatural causes (suicide or a bullet) in the last 70 years. You may think Taiwan politics is messy and it is but look behind it, you'll see the beauty of it. A two-party democratic society naturally bickers to the point that it seems nothing gets done and that is the whole point of the system! When you have reached that level of prosperity (like the U.S., Iceland, and Taiwan), you want a system that maintains the status quo. China's current system is working well and let's hope it will continue to do so and if a transition does happen for the better, let's hope it will be more like Taiwan's model, not South Korea's (or Libya's).
Mankind fears changes. So they want to maintain the status quo. When face with difficult decisions, they would hide behind the system saying we don't need to make any decisions or the decisions can wait. When they fall behind their competitors, they would bury their head in the sand and say we are not doing so bad. When all else failed, then they embrace populism and blame everything on others.
Sorry to say I wouldn't support any government that bury its head in the sand and hope all problems go away. Government exists to make difficult decisions not to play populism. Government exists to make progress not to maintain a status quo. Qing Dynasty was very good at maintaining status quo but the world left it behind. And we all know what happened.
