As you dial, a fresh force is emerging

Many of today's new multimillion-dollar companies have been practically built on the phone, even as that same device has left many older companies, including telecommunications service providers, floundering, because they have failed to provide more value-added services.

Now more and more banks are learning to compete with small Web-based platforms to match small lenders with borrowers. It is clear that banking will follow retail to soon become an online industry.

In Beijing, a just-unveiled program called Made in China 2025 is aimed at upgrading the country's industry. Ten focus areas have been chosen, information technology being the first of them.

This is followed by: high-end numerical control machines and automation; aerospace and aviation equipment; maritime engineering equipment and high-tech vessel manufacturing; advanced rail equipment; energy-saving vehicles; electric power equipment; new (meaning composite) materials; biomedicine high-performance apparatuses; and equipment for industrialized agriculture.

That list may look very dry, and, as with any government program, it is difficult to say in which direction the work in these areas may head and its degree of success. But if one thinks of them in the context of a country of 1.3 billion people dissatisfied with the status quo and yearning for more change, one can only imagine a very different China 10 or 20 years from now. For one thing, it will not just be retail and banking for which the mobile Internet has become an integral part.

Only by looking at things this way, from such a historical perspective, can one really appreciate that China's so-called new normal marks neither a dead standstill, a short pause or a sharp turn, but a long-term process in which many small opportunities will evolve and add to one another and eventually create yet another unstoppable force.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily.