What does the past tell us about the future?

Jieying Zheng

October 19, 2009

A recent project at Volans involved developing future scenarios for a major company’s sustainability advisory council, imagining what the world might look like in 2097. John’s guiding thoughts on predicting the future include looking backwards, referring to Churchill’s dictum that the further you can look back, the further you can look forward. Or at least that approach can work if you can spot the underlying patterns that drive the world forward.

When I tried to look backwards 88 years, specifically through the lenses of my own family history, it was very interesting to think about the shifts of mindset, national culture, and what this meant for my family—and, at another level, what it has meant for politics and for entrepreneurship in China.

The lens that came to mind first was that provided by my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She was born in the early 1920s and, as was the way then, at age 5 was arranged to be married by her family. Incredibly, she dug a hole into the ground outside their house and saved enough coins to buy a single ferry ticket to Chongqing, the closest major city to her hometown. She escaped from her family at such a young age, and later became an activist for the Communist Party when she was working as a child labourer at a local textile factory.

The more I think about this story, the more I have come to appreciate her extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit. Embedded in a profoundly challenging historical context, the mindset of subsequent generations in the last 60 years of the Chinese history has been much more tightly controlled and heavily influenced by the mainstream powers.

I sometimes wonder whether the level of courage that enabled my grandmother to take her escape, —as well as prompting some of the historic movements such as the May Fourth Movement in 1919— would be beyond the wildest dreams for most people today. Whatever the answer, my grandmother’s choices have been an ongoing inspiration for me as my own journey took me to Singapore, the USA and now the UK.