There is a tone to Chinese official propaganda that is worthy of Professor Pangloss and his irrefutable case that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Beijing’s favoured phrases, such as “win-win cooperation” and “community of common destiny for all mankind,” are designed to evoke an image of China as the fountainhead of conflict-free benevolence. A similar if much more sophisticated feeling runs through Keyu Jin’s (金刻羽) book.
Jin teaches economics at the London School of Economics. She is the Harvard-educated daughter of a former deputy minister of finance who now heads up China’s first multilateral development bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. As such, she is well placed to compare key features of western and Chinese economic systems, as she does to good effect in this volume. She is perhaps less well placed — or less eager — to deal with politically contentious questions.
It is not that Jin ignores them. Rather, she displays a disconcerting lack of engagement and a tendency to omit unwelcome information. She acknowledges that there are issues that are likely to concern her readers, but also implies that they are rather beside the point. What matters for economists such as herself, she explains, are numbers and evidence. If either is lacking — on the question of recent events in Xinjiang, for instance — the topic cannot usefully be addressed.
This can produce a curious result. Jin’s book is cogently written, full of insights and rich in well-chosen anecdotes. But it also feels like a landscape peppered with concealed rabbit holes: the reader strolls happily across it, only to suddenly step into an empty space.
Take, for example, a reference to the many children who died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未), at the time not yet exiled from his homeland, was beaten up when he went to investigate and later mounted a moving exhibition of children’s backpacks. Jin’s reference to the child deaths occurs in a passage on the tendency of Chinese households to save.
She argues that when Chinese families were large, older generations felt less need to save because their children would take care of them in old age; with the one child policy, couples saved more. So far, so logical. Then she adds that “greater risks and uncertainty also provide incentives to save,” citing the earthquake deaths of the Sichuan children “in flimsily built schools.” The message seems to be that it is prudent to save harder because your only child might die and not be around in your old age.
Not mentioned is the corruption that built flimsy schools: tellingly, the party headquarters did not collapse. When the bereaved parents demanded accountability for their dead children, they were brutally suppressed.
Elsewhere, Jin refers to a drop in grain production between 1959 and 1961, without mentioning that harvests collapsed because of government policy, and between 30 and 50 million citizens starved to death as a direct result. This omission is the more surprising since she insists that accountability is the key to the legitimacy that she argues the Chinese Communist party enjoys. The real cause of that mass starvation is still not officially acknowledged.
The author also praises China’s COVID policies, which, she writes, were readily accepted — even embraced — by the population, despite ample evidence of protests in Shanghai and other areas against the many abuses of the system. Within three weeks of the first appearance of COVID-19 in Wuhan, she writes, the government had moved swiftly and effectively to protect the population. That is an assertion that might surprise the many scientists and WHO officials who have been unable to verify with certainty either the date or place of the first cases because of destroyed records and official obstruction. Even more recently, the spike in deaths that followed the abrupt reversal of the policy in December last year is being scrubbed from the record.
We learn that Chinese social media carries lively discussions on many topics that, she believes, would surprise western critics of China who take too narrow a view of life under the CCP. No doubt many westerners do lack subtlety and nuance in their perceptions of the country, but the study she cites in evidence was carried out between 2009 and 2013, a time of far greater freedoms and livelier debate on all fronts than exists under current conditions.
Today, according to China Digital Times, which tracks Chinese censorship, previously tolerated topics are censored.
“Financial news, once considered a relatively safe topic for public discussion, has been repeatedly censored amid a potential recession. Youth unemployment figures have been sporadically censored… Other recent targets of censorship include cremation statistics (which hint at COVID’s true death toll), reports on [the Chinese crime of] ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble,’ health and science blogs, and even Alibaba listings of toys that were a tongue-in-cheek reference to a recent instance of official mendacity.”
As an economist, Jin is aware of the current debate between analysts who argue that China has peaked and may stagnate, and those who take a more optimistic view. Both agree that the era of rapid growth is over and the middle-income trap is threatened. They differ in their assessment of the system’s capacity to deal with it.
Jin is an optimist: while she acknowledges the well-rehearsed challenges — a ropey financial sector, huge internal debt, collapsing property market and an ageing population — she believes Beijing has a unique and still evolving model that will allow China to grow through these difficulties. In her account of the previous phases of Chinese growth she rightly points to the role of ambitious local politicians in fostering new companies and industries. Whether she is right to extrapolate from that experience that today’s leaders can address the country’s contemporary issues in the same pragmatic, incremental and ultimately successful manner, remains contested. Those who disagree point to endemic corruption, increased repression and stalled total factor productivity as obstacles yet to be effectively tackled.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
These are volatile times for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with the party’s founder, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), in and out and back in jail repeatedly, Ko resigning as party chair and naming TPP caucus convener Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) to replace him and an upcoming party leadership vote. How representative of the party’s supporters has the party’s leadership been recently? The TPP caucus in the legislature is so closely aligned — and votes so similarly to — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that they are in effect a pan-blue party now. Billing themselves as the “white force” between the pan-blue and pan-green
RSS