Permission and procrastination have exhausted the patience of even the Chinese communists.
If there was a sign missing that Chile lost its path to prosperity in the last decade, the last one comes from the least expected place: from the company of a prominent Communist Party militant… Chinese. This is BYD, the electric vehicle company founded by chemist Wang Chuanfu in 1995 in the town of Shenzhen. Wang’s right-hand woman, Stella Li, has just publicly complained about the delays and slowness of business development in Chile.
There is no official record that Stella Li is a member of the Communist Party, but it would be very strange if this expert in statistics, who graduated from the selective Fudan University and who began as a marketing manager selling batteries, does not know well the ins and outs of politics in her country.. Li also has a talent for negotiating. BYD has sent her to Germany to improve relations in a place where the heat engine industry was waiting with the knife between its teeth. She spends time in California and travels throughout Latin America. So, she knows what she’s doing.
BYD’s patience in Chile must have suffered a lot for Tamara Berríos, the brand’s country manager who works under Li, to come out with a criticism as explicit as the one reported by the newspaper El Mercurio last week. It is also illuminating about the conduct of the President of the Republic, who a year ago met with Wang and promised to put his all into the lithium broiler. “In electromobility, Chile was the first and has been advancing very quickly. That made China understand that Chile had a vision. However, there was a timing which I think was lost. The speeding up of decision-making was not correct,” Berríos said, according to the newspaper.
“I think the Government should be a little more aggressive, because Chile is one of the countries with rich lithium resources.”. But every time you need to depend on the Government, such as a tender, you need the Government to give you authorization. “This blocks the development stage and I think that should change,” Li added in an interview with the same newspaper.
Permitology, excess regulation, the degrowth mentality, but also procrastination, that very Chilean thing of leaving for tomorrow what we can do today, are installed in the country. Chile continues to live off the prestige it gained when it thought it was a jaguar, but today there is nothing left of that. The country is in a decadent situation from which it will be very difficult to get out.
The other day I downloaded from the Chilean Memory site of the National Library a copy of ‘Chile, a case of frustrated development’ by Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, published in 1959. That book is part of the tradition of Chilean works about our lost opportunities in the which also includes ‘Our economic inferiority’ by Francisco Antonio Encina. I never thought that, after the enormous price we collectively paid for the reforms carried out during the military regime, we would return to a similar situation. I have begun to reread these books avidly, convinced that we have carefully signed up for a second part and no one seems to want to take us off this crazy path.
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