21 Oct 2006

Reflections on Sino-British conference on social innovation in Beijing

The Chinese state five-year plan spells out the need for social innovation in parallel with economic growth, which is causing environmental damage and leaving people behind. So the Young Foundation (of which I’m a Fellow) and the British Council agreed to do a conference on social innovation with the influential Beijing think-tank CCPE. I’ve just come back from it head spinnning with impressions and ideas (and with some new handmade suits and shirts in my bag). I’m deeply satisfied with the trip (cheers everyone) and also not satisfied.

The social innovation I admire comes from peoples deepest convictions, and in respectful and effective ways a community can work together for a shared inner purpose. it’s rooted in compassion and grows in the soil of suffering which is widespread and plentiful, especially in China.

Did we see any human compassion at all while in China? Either we didnt get deep enough, or it’s in short supply outside the family context. Hotel or restaurant staff, masseurs and shop assistants don’t count, nor do ranting commissars shouting about how good their cities are of which we’d had plenty before I started choosing my siesta times more carefully. I don’t think career, ego, money, promotions, desire for recognition help people on the path to social innovation any more than those absurd rip-off Beijing bicycle taxis get you where you want to go. 

The missing vision of social innovation based on compassion was supplied to me by a man called Mike Harland in 10 minutes over a beer in a formidable Thai restaurant. He told me about his work as a probationer, with sex offenders, with prisoners in Russia and with a dozen or more NGOs. His compassion, he told me instantly, came from his Mum (who was of a Quaker family) Mike got nearer the point than the rest of us by fixing, via the British Council, to meet Beijing NGOs the day after the event. While I was shopping he was meeting people scratching the surface of social needs in China (for example, working with a few hundred of an estimated 600,000 prison orphans).

The Forbidden City moved me as a place of deep, calm reflection - the most beautiful, internally consistent and structured visualisation of state power I have ever seen. The present Chinese state seems to find it irrelevant but hard to destroy, and contributes instead an eight-lane cross-expressway, the bleakness of Tianemen Square and the carbuncle of the Mao mausoleum, knocking down the remaining shabby backstreets to impress the world for 2008.

The Ideal Gov WIBBI is this. If you’ve got a five-year plan that specifies social innovation, spare a thought for those who spontaneously and most clearly articulate the very needs that social innovators will resond to. Don’t squash them with tanks, shoot them or lock them up in jails or pseudo-psychiatric institutions, because these are the very people you need most, just as the racist South African establishment needed the values that Mandela embodied. Listen to them, and make them in turn articulate their own wibbies, and put their energies into following them up.

That said, the visit has given me a bit more of a sense of the scale of the challenge the Chinese authorities face. The rest of the world should be ready to sacrifice quite a lot to have a stable and peaceful People’s Republic. Who cares if they cant do full Google searches as long as the place doesnt implode and they don’t attack Taiwan.

Final thought: WIBBI we could arrange UK immigration visas and low-cost housing for 120 Chinese tailors please? An inclusive, harmonious society should make it easy for people of all sizes to dress themselves at reasonable cost, and the old Polish and Cypriot jacket- and trouser-makers are overworked and dying out. 

 
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