The Netherlands, a Country to Be Proud Of.
Friends who have studied or built careers in the Netherlands have all, one after another, mentioned their time in this small European country with real pride in their voices, and back then I didn't pay it much attention.
In my teens I travelled through the Netherlands — 7 days, 5 countries, a whirlwind of sightseeing. If anything truly left a mark, it was probably only The Diary of Anne Frank, which shaped the mindset and openness with which I've kept a diary ever since.
For all these years, the Netherlands, as a not-very-conspicuous European country, brought to mind only tulip mania, windmills, Delftware, ASML and the red-light district...
But now, when the Netherlands comes up, what springs to mind is: governing water as you govern a nation, freedom, cooperation, innovation, and this famous, proud Dutch saying:
"God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands."
I wouldn't say I was "blown away" — only that "you have to hand it to them."
This small country, surviving in the cracks between three European powers — Britain, Germany and France — with a land area just 2.5 times that of Beijing, this tiny patch of land that has lived under the threat of floods year after year, showed me the courage, determination and humanitarian spirit human beings are capable of...
Looking back now, I understand where my friends' pride comes from — people who have been steeped in the culture here and trained in its abilities really have received a rare experience and gift.
Netherlands | First Impressions
"Nether" is written "Nieder" in Germanic and means low-lying land, so "Netherland" means "the low country, the lowlands."
A quarter of the Netherlands lies below sea level, another quarter is less than 1 metre above it, and the lowest point, near Rotterdam, is nearly 7 metres below sea level.
Surrounded by sea on several sides and harassed and threatened by floods year after year, it is the lowest-lying country in the world, yet also the one best able to defend against floods.
The Netherlands had the world's first stock exchange, and was once an "empire on which the sun never set," dominating the globe for more than a hundred years;
The Netherlands was the first country in the world to pass a same-sex marriage law, and also the first to legalise euthanasia;
Its brain bank is famous for its complete system of case records, and has supported a great deal of brain research around the world.
The Netherlands has enviable lithography technology and has given birth to world-shaping companies like Philips and ASML;
With 2.5 times the land area of Beijing, it has become the world's second-largest agricultural exporter;
The Dutch invented the microscope, and invented Wi-Fi...
Not to mention great artists like Van Gogh and Rembrandt;
It has nurtured the pragmatic, innovative and deeply cooperative Dutch people;
and it gave rise to the Polder Model, a form of social organisation full of human communal wisdom.
Starting with how the Dutch manage water...
In 2008, the Netherlands held a national debate: with sea-level rise now a certainty, the country faced 3 choices:
(1) Relocate, as Tuvalu has, with some people emigrating to Germany; (2) Retreat back from the current coastline; (3) Be stubborn: reclaim land from the sea, build dams, fight the water and live with the water. — The Netherlands chose the third.
This wasn't the first time they'd made that choice. Since the 4th century AD, the Netherlands has been building dikes continuously.
Having held back the external threat with the world's longest flood defences, the Netherlands then found itself troubled by an internal one: how to drain floodwater from its inland waterways.
They discovered that building canals not only helped drainage and kept residential areas safe from flooding, but also opened up water and land transport and developed irrigation and drainage for farmland, so they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the great enterprise of digging canals. By the 17th century, the Netherlands had made canal-building into something it did better than anyone in the world.
Today, the Dutch are already considering raising their water-management works from once-in-a-thousand-years and once-in-ten-thousand-years standards to the once-in-ten-thousand-years level.
Short on time, so I'm just throwing my notes on water management up here.
To sum up how I feel: the scientific understanding, technical capability, engineering capability, grasp of the environment and ecology, and modes of social governance that water management demands are highly complex and systemic, requiring a country that is highly developed in every respect to coordinate all sectors of society, and even negotiate with other countries, to get it done together. This is not only a practical problem but also a philosophical one worth thinking about.
A society that holds the individual in the highest regard accomplished all of this through collective strength. The reason goes back to the documentary about the great flood of 1953, and the two words the Dutch said after suffering such painful losses: Never Again.