January 9, 2008

An interesting look at China

By someone who has been on the inside since day zero. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
China's economic power needs the party
Many of China's sharpest thinkers, funnily enough, never really went to school. They were the students who waged urban warfare in the name of Chairman Mao and traveled to all corners of the countryside to learn about life from peasants.

Qin Hui, a Tsinghua University economic historian and one of the country's most important public intellectuals, was out of town when Mao changed his tone and the governor of the poor, southern province of Guangxi smashed his student-worker Red Guard faction in 1968.

Twenty of Qin's classmates were killed. The schoolboy Qin agreed to be "sent down" to the mountainous western corner of Guangxi to spend nine years studying real rural life. Each month he would trek 30 kilometres to the highway and hitch into town to borrow books on medicine, agricultural machinery and electricity supply. He taught himself to read English and ploughed through works of social theory and American criticisms of the Soviet Union.

In 1978, when Mao and his Cultural Revolution were dead, Qin returned to the city and accepted a graduate place in Lanzhou University studying peasant history. It was his first day of formal education since primary school.

These days he carries both the idealism that fed the Cultural Revolution and the cynicism of state power that was its aftermath. He believes in market forces, socialism and liberalism. In China this means he rejects the Left's calls for state control and the Right's tolerance of it - and is therefore always on the outer.
OK -- so I think that we have a decent set of bona-fides...
Until recently Qin had always studied global history to inform his understanding of China. Last year, as the outside world was becoming acquainted with China's financial power as well as its manufacturing might, he used his understanding of Chinese history to deliver a warning to the world.

In an as yet unpublished seminar paper delivered at Monash University, he began:
" 'Only socialism can save China', Mao Zedong used to say. After the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism, some said that 'only China can save socialism'. But this now seems more and more ironic. The decade and more since 1992 above all shows that only China can destroy socialism."

He went on to argue China's rampant state-dominated, welfare-lite capitalism could so undercut competitors that it could threaten the social democratic traditions that underpin the West - unless China could change itself in time. Qin argues China's phenomenal market success lies in stripping its peasants and workers of their rights to associate and bargain.
A bit more:
The popular Western view that China will soon collapse under the weight of its political and economic contradictions is fantasy, and becoming more unrealistic by the day. The bigger questions require the world to accept that China is already a powerful world force.
For reasons well-explained in the article. One more paragraph:
The world therefore needs to come to terms with the nature of Chinese capitalism - Qin calls it "autocratic capitalism" - and consider what institutions and systems it might find itself importing from China, along with the great wall of capital and plasma TVs.
Interesting and scary. We have shipped so much of our manufacturing over to China that the startup costs to resume here would bankrupt most industries. Not very well thought out -- chasing the immediate profit instead of long-term growth. And now, they are making eyes at Taiwan... Posted by DaveH at January 9, 2008 7:15 PM
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?