Western media article: From Shenzhen, how Chinese dream of the future

On January 17, the website of Spain's "Uprising" newspaper published an article entitled "China's Futurism, How Does China Dream of the Future?" The full text of the article is excerpted as follows:

The new global order positions China as a world power. China's social and economic goals have a special attachment to the development of new technologies. This is also reflected in the young city of Shenzhen, where the future is the protagonist. In the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, the reporter saw the future of China and the imagination of writers and artists for the future.

Shenzhen is the science and technology center of southern China, and the Center for Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in the heart of the city looks like a spaceship, surrounded by high-rise buildings with glass curtain walls and neat tree-lined avenues that surround the pavilion. The city's population is probably the youngest in the world, and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, a jewel of the city's architecture, pays homage not to history, but to tomorrow.

Because in China, the future is everywhere. From exhibitions of paintings that combine art and technology, to official documents establishing mid-term (to 2025) and vision (by 2035) targets, discussions on science and innovation are repeated in universities, think tanks and museums. It is clear that after the most rapid economic changes in history, Chinese people have unlimited dreams for the future, and dream of China becoming a geopolitical and technological leader in the future.

So the building that pays homage to tomorrow is located in Shenzhen, a city known as the "Silicon Valley of the East," home to the headquarters of digital giants Tencent, ZTE and Huawei. In just two generations, Shenzhen has grown from a fishing village to a metropolis where more than 10 million people live, work and study. This leap has made it a template for learning across the country.

"The construction of an innovative country has yielded fruitful results, and a number of major scientific and technological achievements have been made in the fields of manned spaceflight, lunar exploration engineering, deep-sea engineering, supercomputing, quantum information, 'Fuxing' high-speed train, and large aircraft manufacturing." China's five-year plan for 2021-2025 reads. Among the social and economic goals set by the Government, special attention is paid to the development of new technologies.

President Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream" slogan combines economic growth with scientific development. To this end, state investment in research is growing at a high rate. In just a few years, China has become a major global investor in the development of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and big data, and experts believe that these technologies will determine the future of the world.

The dream of modernization is also manifested in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, and the science fiction films that save the earth, the works of futuristic writers, and the graphic art that condemns the destruction of the future environment all show a reflection on the future, which may be one of the impacts of China's dizzying development.

Entering this museum, you are greeted first by the words of Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China's reform and opening up, and the rise of Shenzhen is inseparable from his guidance and design.

The rest of the pavilion showcases an imaginary future. Tomorrow can be foreseen from Shenzhen's urban planning, with the first few exhibition halls showing how to control population growth, how metropolises can emerge from scratch, followed by plans for the next few decades, such as new urban areas full of green space, landscape buildings adapted to tropical vegetation, logistics hubs dedicated to reducing transport time and carbon emissions, and so on. Then there are the imaginings of the future world, including the artist's vision of the cities of the future under the influence of climate change, which show different underground layers, brilliant devices that control greenhouse gas emissions or dispose of garbage.

Source: Reference News Network