History as Destiny

Stephen Green is chairman of HSBC. HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. HSBC’s international network comprises around 8,000 offices in 88 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. The firm has some 220,000 shareholders in 119 countries and territories.

Green has been with HSBC since 1982 and has also been an ordained priest in the Church of England since 1988. He has spoken widely on integrity and sustainability in business and on the value of values. His current book, Good Value – Reflection on Money, Morality, and an Uncertain World (2010) was a Financial Times Book of the Year.

Green has the following interesting passage regarding China:

The reemergence of China as a world power is the most important event of the first half of this century. It will be described by many as the “emergence” of China, but in fact we should not forget that it is a return to a lengthy status quo ante - - for eighteen of the past twenty centuries China has been the world’s largest economy. The Economist not long ago described it thus: “China was not only the largest economy for much of recorded history, but until the fifteenth century, it also had the highest income per capita - - and was the world’s technological leader.” As recently as 1820, China accounted for one-third of the world’s GDP while the US accounted for a mere two percent. By 1914 tables had turned, with the US accounting for 19 percent of global GDP and China, which had been almost completely bypassed by the European Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, less than 10 percent. But the pattern is changing again: China is returning to the world stage. Since its own internal free-market reforms, in 1978, China’s GDP has grown at an average of around 10 percent a year. Today China is the fastest growing economy in the world, and within twenty years, by many predictions, it will (once again) be the largest.