Henwood: > Well yeah, but there's a tendency in left discourse to bracket out > China, except to talk about sweatshops and political repression. The > U.S. recession has gotten far more PEN-L traffic than growth in > China, which has grown almost 10% a year over the last two decades.
Well, for a start , a lot of those figures are about as accurate as, say, unemployment figures from the US. Second, a lot of that growth has been 'robbing peter to pay paul' so to speak. As the east coast has boomed and pumped up the statistics, the interior has waned. You might say there just isn't enough of an accurate historical database about the Chinese economy to say much of anything except to say over the past 20 years it has changed a lot and it has grown some. Since 9-11 happened hardly anyone noticed China's acceptance into the WTO--at least all those globally minded Americans hardly noticed. > How'd it happen? What'd it mean? What's happened to incomes across > the spectrum? Even if ineq increased, are the poor better off than > they were 10 or 20 years ago? The China model is, I know it sounds trite, unique. It combines the US penchant for pumping money into research, development and the economy via the military and space/missile/aerospace programs while it also follows a somewhat Japanese model for development, at least on the east coast. In that sense, the gov't plans how to make capital for development and building readily available. I'm not sure China will be as successful at taking full development into the hinterland the way Japan did (the side of Japan most Americans know nothing about but which figures heavily in Japan politics and in its economy). One thing that has really helped China is the investment into China from the US, Japan and Korea (a lot of it profitable but probably non-productive cronyism if you look at the Bush family portfolio). It's been Japan with S. Korean chaebol as well that have been largely responsible for the building of modern factories able to churn out custom-fitted but factory-made suits, computers, DVD players, and white goods. Also, the US cheap dollar/strong yen policy has pushed China into the fore as huge exporter to both the US and Japan (Japan has a very large account deficit with China). This is why the Chinese are now upset by any depreciation of the yen, even if it is short-term (as are a lot of currency speculators whose constant source of money was always betting against that depreciation). The Chinese I meet and get to know in Japan still act like they come from a secretive and repressive society. For example, one might have a girlfriend from China but he doesn't want the other Chinese to know they are together or that she is even here in Japan. And these people are in Japan because they have connections to the CP, otherwise they wouldn't be permitted to leave China. If you get them actually talking about China as they know it, they talk of uneven development (city vs. countryside, east coast vs. the interior, SE vs. most of the rest of the country), loss of farmland and ecological destruction, enormous pollution and waste problems, and social disruptions (everyone trying to move to the east coast, people leaving farming to try for work in the cities, even if it means camping out under a bridge). Most Chinese I know here are economic and political immigrants in true senses of those words; they would prefer to stay in Japan than go back after they've lived a while here. One of my best friends, who is from China, says he doesn't want to go back because he loves the social freedom of Japan and hates the prevalent crime in the Chinese provinces (he doesn't come from an east coast city, but rather the deep interior). When we were taking a summer hike in the peaceful Japanese countryside I asked him what his part of China was like. He said, lots of countryside but you wouldn't walk through it like this because of bandits. He's also increasingly uncomfortable with being identified as 'Chinese' in Japan because recent Chinese immigrants are associated with crime waves in the Kanto. His hope for a future job is connected with helping (I won't name the company but it's a famous brand), an electronics company with several factories here in Fukui, to set up production somewhere in 'green field' China. His father has lived in Japan and worked for them, as does his older brother. If China can resolve its Taiwan issue peacefully (though the Koreas could be equally cataclysmic for China) and meet its fast-growing energy needs (a bif IF), it's set to surpass Japan in GNP in a decade and the US in two. But that's also because of its enormous population. I almost think the elite in Japan would be happy to see the US concentrate its often aggressive and manipulative foreign and trade policies toward China while Japan slips into some sort of 'Italy' or 'Sweden' status. Hard to do, though, if you have no EU to tie yourself to. Charles Jannuzi Fukui, Japan
