The Shock of Living in Emerging Times

The massive and unprecedented transportation crisis in China set off by winter storms have unfolded like a horror movie. Television images around the world have shown the startling throngs of millions of people stranded for days without food, shelter or other basic facilities of life, simply because the Chinese transport system couldn't cope with the snow.

The staggering misery at Guangzhou's train stations today is something many of us in the west can't fathom. We don't have than many zeroes in our census results; the scale of this is too big to comprehend. And while many, many of us have been stuck in airports over night at least once, no doubt, thanks to weather, we've probably never faced the desperation of those who have been told to be ready to camp out for as much as two weeks.

This at a time when China is positioned as one of four large countries - known as the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, China) -- once mired in poverty and desperation for centuries, now "emerging" economic powers in the world thanks to globalization and wider trade.

And China's sudden and massive woes this week were not the only ones in the BRIC world. An undersea cable rupture off Egypt's coast has blacked out the internet from Cairo to Bangladesh, knocking out many of the region's main trading houses in Dubai and startling India's booming global services sector. Vital systems inside India's much-vaunted call centers were cut off for almost two days, causing immense concern not only there but among many multinationals dependent on the sector.

And this is where all these staggering problems unfolding on TV around the world have something in common. These are the shocks we should expect when truly gigantic countries begin to emerge economically. It can never happen seamlessly, but the scale of all of this shows that this emergence is indeed happening apace, and very dramatically.

I've written plenty about the strains and struggles here in Brazil as the country chugs along economically to "investment grade" status. All last year, the nation was gripped by the near collapse of the domestic air travel system, roiled from being starved of infrastructure investments, technology upgrades and proper control staffing or regulatory coordination for too many years, while average Brazilians suddenly had enough money to start zipping around their country on budget carriers and the industry began a wave of growth. We had two record-setting and traumatizing airline crashes blamed clearly on failures in the domestic system, and a government scrambling to blame everyone else.

But in reality, these shocks - upsetting as they are from a human perspective - are also harbingers of good news as well. They confirm that China, India and Brazil truly are undergoing economic transformations, writ large by the scale of these shocks. The vast majority of stranded travelers in China are migrant workers trying to get home to rural areas for the Lunar New Year holidays; these are people who were starving to death across the countryside 30 and 40 years ago under China's old economic order. True, they represent the wide sector of Chinese society that has not felt the dramatic benefits of the country's sustained boom, but as much of the bottom end of society they are also employed and they are mobile. That is a dramatic change. What's more, senior Communist leaders in government have been dashing all over the country to show their faces in the troubled areas, sending soldiers to bolster electricity grid repairs, and doing something truly unthinkable for a Communist country -- they are publicly and personally apologizing to the people suffering from the failures in the system.

At once, we see a wave of humanity with the means to travel that is larger than the country's ability to handle them, and a government worried and humbled by public opinion in the peasantry. Those are signs of great progress hidden in the images of the crisis.

Also, while a two-day national blackout of internet service in the United States would be economically devastating and even might lead to social disorder, industry and government in India rebounded well today. A majority of links were restored by today, and the results showed that both the private and public sectors had indeed thought about such things happening and had some sense of how to handle it, even if it didn't have sufficient backup systems that were not so fragile as to be downed by two measly cables in the water off Alexandria, Egypt. Odds are they have learned a lot in the last 48 hours that will be useful going forward.

And in Brazil, we are about to go into the Carnaval holiday, and the travel grid is going to be strained to the limit again. If the Christmas and New Year season was any indication, the (late) changes and reforms applied immediately after the TAM crash in São Paulo last July reduced traffic at the source of most of the system's congestion, our domestic Congonhas airport, and things went relatively smoothly. On our return from Europe, we had to wait on a fairly long line through customs, but it seemed only because of the number of passengers who forgot to fill out their forms. Nothing else to complain about.

Last night, there was another comically Brazilian sign of pseudo-progress. A happy shock. We got two robocalls on our house phone throughout the day -- presumably one for each of us -- from the federal airports management authority Infraero. It was a heavily accented caipira voice-actor (I guess to give him a sense of common-man authenticity), who cheerily wished us a happy Carnaval season and advised us not only to get to the airport early if we were traveling, but to remember that Infraero is working day and night to make sure we get to our destination safely and on time.

I was floored! When was the last time the FAA rang you up back home to say Merry Christmas?? And not only that, but so efficiently?? (The first call was at 4pm, the second at 8pm. Was it alphabetical? How in hell did they get our phone number in a country where nothing ever works perfectly like that?) This wasn't an airline. It wasn't even a consumer NGO. It was the government!

So, at moments like this in any huge economic emergence, the shocks that are natural are tests of the people's mettle as well as the systems and governments in place. Will the misery they face in the transition upward turn to cynicism and lost faith? Will it summon old populist ghosts and scapegoating from the bad old days? Or will it serve to not only tame governments and shine lights on the flaws in need of attention, but strengthen the people's resolve to raise the bar of their expectations and not look back?