Previous vigorous economic growth is sputtering and the average Chinese citizen is less enthusiastic about accepting hazardous living conditions as a continual trade-off for economic growth. （1） Despite the literal and figurative grey forecast, I believe in the emerging potential of the Chinese people, in the power of creativity and the combination of those two.
China has had its share of “aha” moments contributing to science, technology , art, and more recently to global business successes such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi which have proven that China can innovate on a scale rivaling anything in the West.
（2） China’s reputation as the “World’s Factory” is accurate only as an eye-catching headline description and I believe the Chinese have, to some extent, been unfairly mislabeled as lacking creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
In the book, The Invisible Gorilla, authors Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, bring to light the idea of “inattentional blindness” illustrated by their earlier study in which participants watch a video and are told to focus on a tight cluster of basketball players with the instructions to count the number of passes between them.
Almost half of the participants fail to see a person, dressed in a gorilla suit, stroll into view, beats its chest, and walk out of view. Many of us simply miss this obvious distraction because we weren’t expecting to see it. （3） This explains how two people watching the same car wreck can set two completely different things, or how medical instruments left inside people after surgery cannot be seen by x-ray technicians and other physicians.
Is the perceived lack of Chinese innovation and inability to think “outside the box another case of inattentional blindness” that Westerners apply to China? Are we just looking for examples of creative solutions through colored lenses based on our expectations of what we think it should look like?
（4） A casual stroll down any busy street in China will yield many examples of people making do with the materials and resources at hand often coming up with creative, innovative solutions to problems, obstacles and challenges. They are undervalued, even ignored, because they are just “simple” solutions for daily problems lacking in potential cultural changing meaning or importance.
The more we try to define creativity, the more elusive it becomes and seems about as explainable as the miracle of birth. We understand the biology, but only up to the point when magic happens. （5） This is when our understanding stops and we are left standing at the edge of our knowledge, scratching our heads as we marvel at the creation.
