China's admirers come from all sorts of backgrounds. They include global capitalists as well as an assorted group of disillusioned left-wingers who find in China an alternative to US and Western ideology
The first group is mesmerized by China's seemingly limitless cheap labor, enabling them to shift their labor-intensive production there. They are heartened by the official commitment to maintain "industrial peace," which means that the state won't allow labor to organize or strike. Equally tantalizing is the prospect of a market of 1.3 billion consumers.
The second group comprises people, including some academics, who are disillusioned with the US and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. They are enamored of China's autonomous model. They are so impressed with its economic growth, achieved without kowtowing to the symbols of global capitalism, that they attribute it to the country's special genius in carving out its own unique path. It is an alternative model to the conventional US-
dictated World Bank/IMF prescription of open markets and tight budgetary policies.
This view is much more tolerant, if not supportive, of China's communist system that has given the country a stable foundation for its continuous growth.
One such proponent of China's alternative/unique model is Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author of The Beijing Consensus, a study recently published by the UK-based Foreign Policy Center. Ramo, a former journalist, is a professor at Tsinghua University. He has managed to put together all the arguments advanced by communist China's admirers and given it the imprint of scholarship. But that is only part of the story.
China is a robber-baron economy with massive national resources siphoned off to line the pockets of party bigwigs and their favored entrepreneurs. He Qing-lian's book China's Pitfall is a damning indictment of the system. Commenting on the mainly urban boom of the 1990s, she wrote that this was "a process in which power-holders and their hangers-on plundered public wealth."
Elaborating, she said, "The primary target of their plunder was state property that had been accumulated from 40 years of the people's sweat, and their primary means of plunder was political power." It sounds very much like the Russian experience.
She also writes that "China is headed toward joint rule by the government and a mafia" -- another worrying similarity with Russia. And then she asks the question: "When you have [economic] development that is built on the premise that people will pursue their interests at the cost of the property and lives of others, is it really worth it?"
Another Chinese writer, Wang Hui, highlights the inequities of the Chinese version of capitalist development. He argues in China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, that its "values, and activities enter into all aspects of life, something that destroys all existing social structures and denigrates the lifestyles of all other [non-Han] social groupings."
In other words, it is creating a rootless society without the values and traditions that were the essence of Chinese civilization through the ages.
According to Wang, "The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence."
The resultant social and economic picture is, therefore, terribly depressing, a reality which is reflected in widening urban-rural income disparities, the migration of the rural population (estimated at anywhere between 100 to 150 million people and growing by 10 million a year) who look for jobs in the cities and their exploitation and exclusion from social services.
Then there's growing urban unemployment with virtually non-existent social benefits, and rising urban crime generally pinned on migrants.
China's alternative model is largely an urban exercise to enrich the party elites and the entrepre-neurial class spawned by it. In the process it has also created an urban middle class looking for upward mobility, devoid of any worthwhile social and moral commitments. It is a model which tends to exclude about 900 million people of rural and regional China. And it it is built on the misery of urban workers.
Writing on China's migrant labor, Anthony Kuhn quoted a construction worker as saying, "They [employers] rip off your labor, and they rip off your skin." They even refuse to pay wages.
According to the official Bei-jing Review, 72.5 percent of the migrant workers are owed wages by their employers, amounting to more than US$12 billion.
To applaud such a socially rapacious system as an "alternative model of development" is beyond comprehension. But non-Chinese people are shielded from these uncomfortable truths. They only get the varnished version of how modern China is growing into a mighty superpower, a new Middle Kingdom on the rise. And the testimonials from experts like Joshua Cooper Ramo only tend to reinforce this internal view.
It is hard to believe that China is undergoing a radical transformation of its economy without any real involvement of its people or defense of their interests. The country's unelected ruling oligarchy decides for its 1.3 billion people what is good for them.
As Zhu Xueqin of Shanghai University wrote, "To talk about reform while ignoring the political content of Chinese economic structures is to weave a set of emperor's new clothes." In other words, the economic superstructure is built on political quicksand.
To argue that the Chinese Communist Party has acquired legitimacy of sorts by its longevity and the resultant economic growth is not tenable. In that case it should have no hesitation in seeking popular mandate. On the contrary: it goes to extraordinary lengths to sniff out even the remotest challenge to its political monopoly. The Tiananmen Massacre is a well-known example. The suppression of the Falun Gong movement is another. And the world gets to hear somehow about the ongoing and heavy-handed suppression of local-level peasant unrest.
At the same time, the economy is in trouble from serious overcapacity in manufacturing. In the steel sector, for instance, 81 new steel mills were reportedly built last year, but only six had sufficient scale to be economic; 75 of them were small-scale and uneconomical.
According to Alan Kohler, an Australian analyst: "It's not just steel. Petrol and fuel-processing capacity increased 132 percent last year, timber processing by 66 percent, metal products by 67, smelting by 52, chemical production capacity by 47. This is in just one year."
The worry now is if China's economy will end up making a hard or soft landing. And we are not even talking about the huge non-performing bank loans.
Against this backdrop, it is foolish to talk of China as an alternative economic and political model.
Sushil Seth is a freelance writer based in Sydney.
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