Is China Prospering Or Just Some Chinese?
The Darker Side of China's Economic Miracle
| What’s the cost of the China’s economy growing so much? This 2009 article was posted on AlterNet July 17. The author’s newest book is "The Uprising". He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at click here. |
By David Sirota
Before planning for and making the trans-global trek to the most populous country on Earth, I knew mainland China mostly through television and movie screens. My sinologists were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Egg Shen, the crotchety shaman from "Big Trouble in Little China" -- a Cabinet of advisers who left me, ahem, unprepared for my recent voyage east.Thus, I was thrilled when, upon arriving here, a Peace Corps volunteer handed me a 1997 tome called "Red China Blues." Written by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong, the book tours a nation on the verge of superpowerdom, and it ends by suggesting the country's industrialization means "the future of China may be the West's past."
One excursion hardly makes me a China guru, but I can report with some confidence that when it comes to economic growth, Wong is right. China is walking in our shoes -- and that's not necessarily a good thing.
On my trip (which you can read more about at Openleft.com), I've seen America circa 1900: coastal metropolises of towering wealth hemming in a polluted and destitute heartland. Two Chinas, as John Edwards might say -- one you constantly hear about and another hidden from view.
In Hong Kong, I gaped at the sleek office towers, fine restaurants and nouveau riche -- the "miracle" endlessly celebrated by the New York Times' Tom Friedman (China is a place of "wide avenues, skyscrapers, green spaces, software parks and universities"), Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria ("China's growth has obvious and amazing benefits for the world"), and most of America's Very Serious Commentators. Indeed, according to MIT's Yasheng Huang, China's most famous cities are known for tricking incurious observers into portraying the entire country as "sanitary ... largely free of grotesque manifestations of poverty (and) one of the most successful countries in tackling income inequality."
Of course, in Guiyang, a coal-mining town of 3 million in China's poorest province, I found exactly the opposite -- the darker side of the "miracle."
Here in the countryside is the soundstage of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick -- filth-covered tenements slapped together with crumbling cement and kitchen tile; limbless paupers with burned faces begging for food; an atmosphere choked by soot, exhaust and the stench of human excrement.
Scholars insist this is the unavoidable consequence of a country being run by the Chinese Communist Party -- an extreme version of the Republican Party that couples Genghis Khan's intolerance with Hank Paulson's authoritarian capitalism. Pundits assert that China's inequality, which according to World Bank data now rivals our own Gilded Age, is just a necessary evil -- the obligatory pitfall of nonetheless positive Western-style development. And while some Americans may lament international poverty, many are too distracted or unsympathetic to care about seemingly far-flung tragedies.
But, then, the challenges China poses aren't about Save-the-Children altruism, and they aren't distant triflings. As none other than "Big Trouble in Little China" presciently warned, China is here -- and we cannot simply cite inevitability as reason to ignore its metastasizing problems.
We're not talking about the United States in 1900 -- a country of only 76 million people pigheadedly despoiling its way into the 20th century. It's 2009, the planet's already on the brink of resource exhaustion and climate catastrophe, and China is 17 times more populous than America during our industrial era.
If we just sit back and listen to those who pooh-pooh "necessary evils" and celebrate supposed "miracles"; if governments refuse to strengthen international environmental policies; if the world merely hopes for the best as 1.3 billion Chinese pursue old-school smokestack industrialization, then there's not going to be much of a world left.
Our future won't be that gleaming Hong Kong skyline we keep being told about -- it will be downtown Guiyang.
JJS: What to do about it? Geonomize. Economic justice is a powerful tool and we neglect it to our detriment. Because prices matter, because people are spurred by costs and benefits, what also matter are taxes and subsidies. When government gets them right, it lets prices become right. And people become economic actors in line with the needs of the planet.
How should China and the rest of us do revenue policy? Geonomically. Shift taxes off the values we make, onto the values we take. Tax pollution, depletion, and exclusive use of location. Complimentarily, shift subsidies from special interests to the general populace, perhaps most efficiently via a Citizens Dividend. Do this -- geonomize -- and your development will fall within environmental constraints.
Geonomics has worked wherever tried. Indeed, it’s what Hong Kong and Tsing-tao used to develop, and more justly, than almost anywhere else.
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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: Humanity's values and choices yield harsh consequences
The losses hurt families but leave the rich only less rich
Massive riot in northwestern China |
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