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If Winter is Here, Can Spring be Far Away

Is it springtime already? A season for new beginnings?

No, a look outside tells me tree leaves are turning yellow, red and brown and beginning to fall to the streets below; the thermometer and chill in my bones in the morning tells me winter is on its way. Yet, the sum and substance of my environment tells me something new and exciting is about to happen.

What? you say. Don’t I know there’s an economic meltdown taking place in that environment? Indeed I do, but I’m also happy that some bad economic thinking that needed to be set aside likely now will be, especially in my home country, the United States, and that this understanding came several days or even weeks and months before the American people put their seal of approval on this change for the better by electing the first African-American to be their president and to lead them in a new direction.

Further, not only do leaders around the world realize that the world of finance and trade needs a comprehensive overhaul, but that the real needs of people in every precinct on our blue marble need to be considered when they do it.

And with the world watching and wondering, China has weighed in with its whopping US$586 billion economic stimulus plan, a plan that will directly affect and improve the lives of nearly every human being in this great land. This is what is called “setting an example” or “setting an agenda.” And since this plan was announced after consultations with other nations with large emerging economies, such as India and Brazil, I don’t think we need to wonder whether this approach to socio-economic affairs is going to affect the lives of people around the world in ways that will be exciting to watch unfold.

In fact, what China has done domestically and in its integration into world affairs (economically and generally), with its statements about foreign aid and economic development at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation and in its response to the global financial crisis has set the stage for reforms in the world economic system and for the major emerging economies to play a greater role in it.

For many of the world’s dispossessed, the world economic system has been dysfunctional for a long time, but as long as it could limp along, propped up by a reform measure here, a government infusion or invasion there…as long as it could deliver the goods in the United States and Europe and in certain other centres of influence around the world, its predominantly western leaders could ignore the effects of its systemic failures elsewhere or even shift the blame for the system’s failures to the victims themselves, both domestically and internationally. No more. The opaque walls which this mysterious system hid behind have tumbled; the system has been found wanting.

But just as with the Sichuan earthquake of May, we have an opportunity to do something new, something better. We can rebuild on the ruins, and in time, the pain of what’s been lost, the lives and communities wasted will fade away.

We no longer have to wait for understanding to “trickle down.” We can now get straight to the point of rebuilding our economies and improving people’s lives. As pundits and experts in other parts of the world wonder what next for their economies and what role China play on the global stage, China has stepped up and said: “Here’s what’s next; here’s what we’re going to do.”

It may be winter outside, but it feels like springtime to me.