China: An Interim Report: Its Economy, Ecology and Future
(first published June 20, 2005; Updated: April 9, 2006)
The hard-working Chinese people deserve prosperity, stability and health, but the long-term prospects for all 1.2 billion citizens of the People's Republic
remain an open question.
I am no more than an interested student of the country and culture, but I
do have two resources: numerous Chinese friends, and a perspective gained from 30 years
of reading augmented by two somewhat unique visits.
My goal is not to list the various obstacles in China's path (although that is a necessary first step),
but to describe the structural impediments to its continuing success--and how they could be overcome.
Although these are well-known and well-documented,
I haven't found a comprehensive overview of all the primary issues; this is an attempt at such a summary.
That the Chinese people possess all the traits needed for great success is self-evident.
The question is
whether their leadership and the structure of their current society possess the traits needed to solve the
enormous environmental, financial and social problems facing the nation.
The Impediments to a Realistic Appraisal
The concepts of 'Face' and national pride make most Asians extremely reluctant to criticize their own nation.
This is certainly true in China.
The usual pattern I encountered was as follows: problems facing China are quickly
acknowledged, then lip service is paid to "learning from America" or the West, implying the solutions are already
being implemented, and then the conversation moves quickly to America's problems or weakening position
in the world.
In other words, the acknowledgement shows the willingness to criticize, which is a sign of strength, but
the follow-up discussion of solutions boils down to "saving face."
Thus I have been assured that political freedoms
in China are equal to those in the U.S. because the speaker was a member of a political party other than the
Communist Party. While technically speaking, this was accurate--there are four officially
sanctioned alternative parties, represented by the smaller stars on the PRC flag--the substance of his assertion was
absurd.
In similar fashion, I have been assured by a young man (all conversations were in English, as I don't speak Mandarin)
that his father was drawing a comfortable pension, along with the majority of other old people in China. The elderly
beggars clustering around me at every train or bus station certainly suggest that isn't quite accurate; as for
the Chinese themselves, when an elderly female supplicant makes her way down the subway car in Shanghai, palms
outsretched in the universal sign of begging, virtually every young Chinese person averts their gaze or
continues their cellphone conversation as if
the woman doesn't exist. I witnessed only one young woman open her purse to give a frail grandmotherly beggar a few coins.
Is this any different than in the U.S.? Of course not; there are ragged, obviously disturbed men and women huddled
on the streets of every American metropolis. The difference is that few Americans would baldly assert an
obvious non-truth, i.e. that homelessness is not a problem in America. They might rant about their preferred solution,
but they would be unlikely to deny the problem exists.
The concept of "face' is certainly pan-Asian, and it can best be described to Westerners not familiar with its
power as the cultural necessity of presenting a positive facade to the world, even if truth and accuracy
must be sacrificed as a result.
National pride and face are intertwined in Asia, adding another impediment to realistic appraisals.
There is no shortage of national pride in America, France,
or indeed any other nation, but in Asia the natural pride in one's heritage is entangled with the cultural
imperative of "saving face" and a strong desire to right (or obscure) the injustices of the past century.
In China, this manifests itself in the pride experienced in reclaiming Hong Kong, and the near-universal
desire to reclaim Taiwan as the "lost province" unjustly taken from China by imperialistic foreigners.
It is difficult, I think, for Americans to fully grasp the damage done to Chinese pride when the Western powers
occupied parts of mainland China. An analogy might be to imagine China occupying Los Angeles in 1901, and then
setting aside much of San Francisco for a "Chinese-only" concession. That such land-grabs would stick in the
craw of the occupied nation is entirely understandable--especially if that nation believes its natural role,
indeed its only possible role, is to be a great world power.
China's people hold a strong sense of China's grand, even unequaled history as the center of the civilized
world (hence the term still used today to denote Caucasians, "Foreign devils"), and a belief in the historical
imperative thus bequeathed to the nation. A comparison to the American concept of "Manifest Destiny" is imperfect
but instructional, I think, in communicating the Chinese desire to reclaim the greatness that was once theirs alone.
This concept provides a bridge of understanding to the Chinese sense of being put upon or restrained by
the West, and America in particular, even when it is obvious that America is simply acting like any other nation, i.e.
in its own self-interest. But an understanding that America is not "out to limit China" but is simply
pursuing the best interests of itself and its allies is rare in China; U.S. actions in the Pacific are seen to
revolve around China rather then the needs of U.S. constituencies or a complex U.S. foreign policy.
Since China's political structure currently precludes a freely distributed, independent media, there is no
counterbalance to the official desire to manipulate public opinion and obscure corruption.
Skepticism of
the official party line is the fundamental stance of Western media; as a free-lancer in the media, I can assure you
that any story which is too "happy-happy" or insufficiently skeptical of received truths will be sent back
for further research and revision.
While there are many in the U.S. with the same naive, parochial blinders--that is, seeing all Chinese policies as
reactions to U.S. initiatives--the U.S. media is not in lockstep with this view. But the media in China is
tightly controlled, and so skepticism of the official worldview is not permitted.
By way of example, imagine a Chinese equivalent of the May 9th issue of
Newsweek
which glorifies
"China's Century" on the cover. While you'd find Chinese agreeing most whole-heartedly with
Newsweek's
thesis, you would never find a national magazine in China trumpeting the prospects of "The American Century"
extending through the 21st century--that is, glorifying America's prospects for continued global dominance.
The cultural imperative to present a positive front inhibits the collection and distribution of accurate
data on the nature and scope of China's problems.
Without accurate and unflinching data, problems
cannot be assessed or solved. In the bad old days of the cult of personality, the
fields of rice along certain roadways were famously overseeded to give the passing Chairman Mao the impression that
the current crop of rice was stupendously abundant. In reality, the crop was a disaster and millions died of
famine--a disaster hidden from the Chairman for reasons of face and political jockeying.
It would be rash, I think, given the questionable reliability of statistics in China, to claim that such "doctoring"
or manipulation of evidence and data is a thing of the past. Indeed, many carefully anonymous reports
suggest that such misrepresentation to give the appearance of progress is structurally endemic. This is
a troubling prospect, for without accurate data, long-term solutions (and the feedback necessary to improve
those solutions) are effectively thwarted.
Consider
a recent survey of 3,000 Chinese bankers and brokers
posted by
Victor Shih, assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University
.
According to this survey,
82% of respondents reported that corruption in China's financial sector is either "very common" or "fairly common."
These insiders also report that when a company or individual defaults on a loan, they are pursued for payment only 13.7% of the time;
in 46% of the cases, defaulters aren't even identified, much less pursued; in the remaiing 40%, the defaulters
are known but not pursued, or pursued half-heartedly.
The survey was broad enough that it cannot be dismissed as a poor sampling. It clearly suggests that the
efforts being made by the central government to "clean up" the Chinese banking sector have been largely
ineffective. The question is: does the central government have the tools to permanently re-work the sector's
culture of laxness and corruption? If it does, then why has the clean-up been so ineffectual?
For further evidence, consider this quote from Professor Shih's website:
Last year, the China Banking Regulatory Commission despatched 16,700 teams to investigate just how much the
situation had really deteriorated from 2003. Shockingly, they uncovered 584 billion yuan in illegal funding
by banks and financial institutions, compared to the 407.2 billion discovered the previous year. Altogether,
2,202 financial institutions were implicated in the commission's investigations, involving 4,294 officials
and staff. Yet only two banks with foreign investment were found to have problems.
This suggests not a system being reformed but a system which is simply perfecting ways to evade whatever weak
regulations and oversights are put in place by the central government.
The Systemic Nature of Corruption
The problem isn't just the vast scope of corruption and denial revealed in this survey; it's that
the incentives in the system reward corruption and punish both honesty and the collection of rigorous data.
Human being are very predictable in one regard; like all organisms, they will respond to rewards and punishments.
If you "play the game" of accepting bribes or other forms of compensation for making loans, everyone up the chain
from you (i.e. your boss and his boss, the local party boss, and so on) is happy, because they will continue
to get their cut of the action. Playing straight would disrupt the entire system, and degrade or eliminate
the perks enjoyed by everyone with a position in the current system.
In a similar fashion, actually pursuing defaulters would quickly ensnare those in the same circle of power
who authorized the loans in the first place, for the granting of loans is all too often part of the unvirtuous
cycle of corruption: I'll arrange for you to receive this huge loan, and you will respond in kind
(a generous bribe, a cut of the deal, or some other compensation) which
I then distribute to cronies and my bosses to enhance or sustain my own position in the system. You are free
to use the money for whatever you want--very likely a poor business prospect or some sort of speculation--and
when the deal goes sour then you don't even have to pay the money back.
There are no incentives to either mid-rank employees or top management to actually reform this system, and
no punishment for those who propagate it.
True, when a corruption case is so egregious that it
angers the populace, then the Party requires a few managers or officials to fall on their swords; but this
"punishment by example" is not systemic or rigorous; everyone knows it's window-drssing to save face, and to
convince (or attempt to convince) the general populace that the Party is serious about its perpetual
"anti-corruption" campaigns.
Few in China believe such campaigns are consistent or rigorous, or even that they're intended to be effective;
but since such blatant and systemic corruption makes China look bad, everyone plays along with the notion
that the central government is "really doing something" about corruption.
Without an independent judiciary (empty claims to the contrary notwithstanding), China lacks a mechanism
to stem such systemic corruption.
Countries with low corruption
(as per a survey of 102 countries compiled by the anti-corruption organization
transparency.org
)
are generally small nations with long histories and strong cultural support for independent judiciaries
and honest/transparent governance--Finland, Denmark and New Zealand top the list.
Interestingly, Asian countries with a recent (and relatively short)
history of independent judiciaries--Singapore and Hong Kong--score as high or higher than very-low-corruption
nations such as Sweden and Canada.
It is with some small irony that we note that the top-ranked large country
(i.e. those with 50 million or more citizens) is Great Britain with a ranking of 8.7 (#10 in the list
of 102). Hong Kong earned
a ranking of 8.2 (14th), while the U.S. (16th) came in at 7.7 (roughly in line with Austria, Chile and Germany),
while China (59th) has a ranking of 3.5, in line with Mexico, Egypt and Ethiopia.
Bangladesh (102nd) came in last with a ranking of 1.2, just below nations like Nigeria, Madagasgar, Indonesia,
Azerbaijan, Paraguay and Uganda.
For comparison's sake, China's great-power neighbors, Russia and India, both received a ranking of 2.7, (71st),
Systemic corruption cripples a nation in three key ways: it undermines meritocracy;
it misallocates capital, and its root injustice breeds resentment and distrust of institutions.
It is generally accepted that the citizenry of the U.S. tolerates an
enormously imbalanced concentration of wealth
--5% of the population owns 59% of all the nation's assets--
because they believe that "getting ahead" is based not just on family wealth but also on merit and
virtuous habits (working hard and saving/investing).
Though the U.S. has the highest such concentration of personal wealth in the world, I think it is self-evident
that virtually every other prosperous nation on the planet has a similar pyramid of wealth, and a similar faith
in individuals' potential to improve their position through merit and virtuous habits.
On the other hand, societies in which position, wealth and prestige are largely assigned through
bribery, party status, caste, ethnicity, religion, etc., are inherently unstable and unprosperous. This is so
self-evident that it cannot be plausibly contested.
While meritocracy is certainly present in China--witness the story of
Weijian Shan
as reported in
The Economist
--so is favoritism and decisionmaking
based on relationships rather than merit (i.e., on the merits of a person's "guanxi").
According to
a confidential study in China,
only 5% of the richest 20,000 people in China made it
on merit. Clearly, meritocracy plays a severely limited role in the distribution of the nation's new-found wealth.
Guanxi is not easily translated into English; it is not a synonym for corrupting relationships but for a
broad range of relationships of varying strength and obligation.
In a nutshell,
Guanxi may fall into to one of these three categories: 1) a relationship between people who
share a group status or are related, e.g. family or co-workers 2) connections between people who have
frequent contact, such as business associates
and 3) contacts between people who have little direct interaction, e.g. business conducted with overseas connections, etc.
Guanxi can simply mean a diplomatic exchange of gifts as a sign of respect, or it can provide a mechanism for
dispute resolution, establishing a new relationship or even collective decision-making. It is best understood,
I think, as an essential cultural component of Chinese society. It should be viewed not as an impediment to meritocracy
but as a condition which, if unchecked by policies backed up by the rule of law, can undermine meritocracy
and individuals' sense that they have a chance to better themselves by abiding by the rules.
This undermining of people's faith in meritocracy has two devastating consequences:
1) better-qualified
people are passed over, relegating the nation's talent to lesser positions while rewarding incompetence, and 2)
the unfairness fuels resentment in those with insufficient guanxi to level the playing field. In China this constitutes
the majority of citizens. And who can blame them for feeling left out of the virtuous circle through not fault
of their own?
Misallocation of capital dooms a nation to stagnation.
Misallocation of capital is simply a way of saying
that money is poorly invested when the decisions to loan or invest are made not on sound business grounds--
i.e., earning a return for investors--but on relationships (e.g. "guanxi").
In a market economy, once production reaches
a balance with demand, then money should stop flowing into building new manufacturing plants,
as increasing supply will only suppress the price of the goods. A rising oversupply inevitably
leads to a collapse in profits and a subsequent rise in bankruptcies and loan defaults.
Thus, misallocated capital sinks some industries into unprofitablity, while depriving more
productive industries of much-needed capital. (For an example of this in
action, consider the
television manufacturing industry in China
--as reported on china.org.cn.)
The
potential for overinvestment in steel
and a subsequent collapse of profitability has been covered by the
Wall Street Journal
.
China has two well-documented mechanisms which systemically misallocate capital: corruption and the need to
prop up state-owned businesses with bank loans.
While a "clean-up" of bad loans in the big four state-owned banks
is being heralded as a "solution" (bad debt is now officially only $230 billion), evidence suggests that bad loans are being made as fast as the old mountain
of bad debt is liquidated (sold off at pennies to the dollar to Western banks). As a result, the billions in
new capital the state has been putting into the banks is being squandered.
In other words, if the system for
granting, tracking and collecting loans hasn't been completely transformed, then the central government's efforts to dispose of old bad debt from bankrupt state-run businesses
is simply clearing the decks for a new round of bad loans. The billions of new capital the government is pumping
into the state banks will inevitably be misallocated, as the underlying culture hasn't been changed. A remodeled
facade has been erected, but that is not the same as rebuilding the structure from the ground up.
The suspicion in some circles is that the government is simply window-dressing a bankrupt
banking system in order to attract new capital from the West and from the overseas Chinese community.
The new
capital wouldn't change anything fundamentally, but it would prop up the system for a few more years--time in which
the government hopes to transform a systemically corrupt culture and industry into a functioning
equivalent of Western financial institutions.
But given the systemic nature of corruption, the huge incentives to its continuation, the
disincentives to changing it from within, the lack of an independent force strong enough to overcome the
purposefully obscure manner in which local party officials, bank officials and
other power players influence loans, this hope seems just that--a hope ungrounded in the actual structure and
mechanisms of the banking sector, economy and government.
Local officials seek new factories--and the loans
to build them--to create new jobs and increase prestige.
Why should they sacrifice growth in their district
just to meet some Beijing goal to limit new loans?
The misallocation of today's huge influx of capital may be a mistake of historic proportions.
While popular belief in the permanence of China's investment boom is high, history suggests the
opposite possibility: that the current massive flow of investment into China is a one-time event. If true, then
the squandering of these hundreds of billions on projects of dubious worth will be seen in the future as a waste
of capital on par with the Cultural Revolution.
Since data cannot be trusted, who would trust assurances that the banking industry is now "transparent"?
Given the intractable nature of corruption and its reach into every nook and cranny of the Party and the banking system,
the more accurate assessment might be that a facade of transparency is being erected to further hide the actual workings of the system.
Human nature (and history) suggest that people in positions of power are willing to cut the benefits of corruption
flowing to someone else, but they will fight to the bitter end to retain their own perquisites.
Unfortunately,
there is no discernable separation between corruption in the banking sector and corruption in the Party, and as a
result all efforts to "reform" one sector or level of the society are
a priori
doomed to fail. Once a powerful
person's toes get stepped on, the "reform" quickly dissipates into mere lip service, a club which is only hauled
out of the closet to beat a lower official who had the misfortune of getting caught
when public pique was high.
Widespread civilian discontent--expressed in both spontaneous and planned demonstrations--is evidence that
frustrations stemming from the injustices of corruption and favoritism are increasingly eroding confidence
in the central and local government.
Even though news of many spontaneous protests is suppressed
or not reported in the officially sanctioned press, that such outbursts are on the rise is not in doubt.
The corruption of the material world--pirating products and watering down quality for private gain--is endemic, and has serious consequences both within China
and in its trade with other nations.
Although the headlines tend to focus on pirated software or luxury
goods and the prevailing Chinese attitude that the theft or duplication of someone else's design doesn't actually constitute
theft, there are very real and very negative consequences to such widespread pirating for the Chinese people.
In terms of health, consider that a significant percentage of "official" pharmaceuticals on the shelves
in China (about 40% by some reckoning) are worthless sugar pills packaged to look like the real medications.
The cost to the Chinese people of such piracy is not just money wasted on worthless knock-offs but in health
compromised or lost.
Life safety is also an issue in the corruption of construction materials and practises.
Stories abound in which
contractors substituted inferior materials or installed less steel or concrete than specified in order to
pocket the difference in costs. According to published accounts (Judith Shapiro,
Mao's War Against Nature
--linked in the "resources" column to your left), 2,976 dams had collapsed by 1980;
others report that a number of bridges have failed or been declared unsafe as a result of this type of corruption.
Again, the counterweights to such exploitation--a free and skeptical press, and an independent judiciary empowered to
imprison wrong-doers, no matter what their position or status--are missing, and so this disgraceful corruption
of public works continues unabated.
Piracy has a steep economic cost as well.
While traveling in China's industrial heartland, a large,
shuttered facility bearing the name of a global pharmaceutical corporation was pointed out to me by an expatriate
resident. It was built with great promise to manufacture modern medicines for the Chinese market, but the
immediate piracy of its products had forced it closure. Chinese customers complained the medicine didn't work--
and of course the sugar pills being distributed in lieu of the authentic drug did not work. So the market
for the company's products dried up, along with any future investment or jobs.
Similar tales are heard in every industry, at every level and every geographic area.
The travails of the
Japanese motorbike manufacturers are well-known; knock-offs of their bikes are nearly perfect replicas, except for
the price of course, which is considerably less than that of a motorcycle built in the Japanese-owned
factories. I sat next to an I.T. representative on a flight to Shanghai a few years ago, who explained that their product's
software had been copied by a new Chinese competitor. Years of legal action and political pressure had squeezed
the competitor into an agreement to work with the legitimate creator of the software. But in the ensuing period,
the U.S. firm had lost sales to the "competitor" whose only product was a stolen copy of the
U.S. firm's software code and design.
I have first-hand knowledge of other smaller manufacturing businesses moving their entire operations in
China to either Vietnam (with a low 2.4 rating) or Thailand (rated a 3.2). Though corruption is equally endemic
in those nations, it was less destructive to their quality, reputation and market than the travails
they'd suffered in China.
There are even deeper costs to the
ubiquity of pirating
and debasement of quality.
What Chinese business
will risk millions on developing world-class software when no one will pay for it? Why invest in research and
development when your product will be quickly copied and marketed for a fraction of your development cost? Will
Chinese consumers pay more for the "genuine article" if it's Chinese-designed? It doesn't seem like a good bet.
The
government may well be funding plenty of R&D, but with rampant pirating accepted as the norm, the question
remains: what high-margin, high development-cost products developed in China will find a home market rich enough
to reward the initial investment? If entrepreneurs with a long-term view and a desire to innovate lose out to
thieves and pirates--often semi-officially sanctioned, it should be noted--then why will they stay in China?
"Corrupt political elites in the developing world, working hand-in-hand with greedy business people and unscrupulous
investors, are putting private gain before the welfare of citizens and the economic development of their
countries," said Peter Eigen, Chairman of
Transparency International.
Given the untrustworthy statistics and the well-concealed intricacies of dealmaking and piracy, it's difficult
to precisely state the true extent of corruption in China;
but all available evidence suggests the nation is in the grips
of a corruption so deep and pervasive that it could hobble all the great efforts being made to move toward a healthier, more prosperous future.
Generational Deadline: Environment, Demographics, Finance
China's Environmental Challenges
The severity of China's environmental problems is well-documented;
an Internet search for "environmental
problems" + "China" produces nearly 300,000 references.
Less well-examined are the cultural
and political underpinnings of the crisis.
By and large, China has followed the traditional industrial development model of "massive production, massive
consumption and massive discharge."
The size of the population and country guarantee that the scale
of each issue is staggering:
Air quality
is so poor in 2/3 of China's cities that it is a public health catastrophe in and of itself,
cutting years off residents' lifespans. With 70% of the nation's energy derived from "dirty-burning" brown coal,
solutions are neither quick nor cheap.
Water supply and quality
are both inadequate; industrial useage of water has skyrocketed, even as
water quality has declined. Rivers are dead, the Yellow River no longer reaches the sea, urban water supplies
are polluted health hazards, water tables are dropping precipitously, etc.
Even if money and other resources are abundant, water shortages alone
will crimp industrial growth. Of China's 617 cities, 300 already face water shortages. Conservation will require
rebuilding most of the water supply infrastructure,
and cleaning up water supplies demands another new and vast infrastructure.
Inefficient use of energy
exacerbates water and air degradation and resource depletion; China uses
signifcantly more energy per unit of output than Japan or the U.S. While government efforts at conservation
have paid dividends, official statistics are (as usual) suspect. To quote a
U.S. Embassy report
"It is now widely acknowledged within China that the official statistics have overstated the decline in coal
consumption."
Rising consumer demand for energy
will easily outstrip gains from conservation.
John Constable, senior UK economist of ExxonMobil, and author of the recent World Energy Outlook, explained:
In China today, the commercial energy consumption in the traded domestic sector is the equivalent to one
100-watt lightbulb per day. Just increasing this to two lightbulbs and a washing machine will mean a massive
increase in energy use.
Desertification is on the march,
moving several miles a year toward Beijing;
reports (as this one from the
Washington Post
)
now put the edge
of the desert 200 miles from the capital. Dust storms are more frequent and more severe, degrading air
quality as far away as Korea. The loss of grazing and farmland could drive millions off the land and into
the cities. Global warming may be exacerbating the trend by reducing rainfall in central China, but human
behavior is the root cause. To quote from
another U.S. Embassy report:
"While drought and climate change are partly to blame, the
root cause is overgrazing, and the only apparent solution is to reduce the pressure on the land by moving
people and their animals out."
Energy "solutions" create new problems;
The Three Gorges dam generates clean electricity, but its
negative effects (via silting) on productive farmland downstream could offset that energy gain. While China is
making progress in "scrubbing" its new coal-fired power plants, relying on the nation's abundant coal reserves
to sidestep the global petroleum scarcity will still increase overall coal use.
Pressures on wildlife habitat, agriculture and human health will grow despite conservation efforts.
The size
and speed of China's development of its natural resources, manufacturing and consumer economy are such that
energy and resource consumption will grow in absolute terms even as energy use per unit of output declines.
All this data supports
E.O. Wilson's view that China is heading toward an ecological bottleneck.
How much passes through that
bottleneck is the open question.
If you read nothing else on China's ecological crises other than this essay,
read
this excerpt from his book
The Future of Life
(in the resources column on the left). China's present path is clearly unsustainable,
and the future is clouded by the same structural flaws outlined in the previous sections.
You may have noticed that I have illustrated all this bad news with beautiful scenes from some of the gardens
and villages I've visited in China.
There is a subtext to this, of course; I wanted to express that China is
far from a wasteland, and that its people have a long history of cherishing Nature and natural beauty.
But an understanding that Nature has limits is not the same as appreciating its beauty.
The idea that there is value in Nature being left wild is not a natural one in most human cultures,
and China (along with the rest of Asia) is no exception. There are historical precedents in Chinese
culture for such an understanding, such as the Taoist and Chan Buddhist poets and writers. But the influence
of
Mao's "War on nature"
(see the book by that title in the resources sidebar) is more recent and more
pernicious.
Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (and the subsequent famine), suppression of intellectual skepticism/dissent,
encouragement of large families, and vast relocations of industry and populations to environmentally fragile
landscapes created a legacy of ecological damage which weighs heavily on today's China.
There is another subtext to the photos:
China's wonderful gardens are intended to feel natural, but they
are not natural; they are artful syntheses of human constructs and natural patterns. This ideal, I think,
underpins all Asian cultures' deep-seated views of Nature, and informs to some degree the government's responses
to environmental issues: people come first, Nature second--until Nature can no longer sustain the people. Then,
of course, it's too late.
China's explosive development could be summarized thusly: personal gain trumps the shared environment every time.
This is the kernel of human behavior at the heart of Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 article
Tragedy of the Commons.
(
Science
has posted
the original article and additional commentaries
.)
The essence of the article is this: the benefits of exploiting whatever resources are freely available to the
entire community (air, water, grazing land, etc.) are outsized to
the individual, but ultimately catastrophic to all when the common resources are depleted or destroyed by
overuse.
The situation in China is roughly analogous, with this proviso: the public is excluded from the commons,
but Party officials and bigshots are free to exploit whatever shared resources they can control.
Sadly,
there are few limits on local Party bosses' powers; although the central government appears to hold the
reins of power, the chain of command is actually rather weak. Thus you often hear tales in which common folk
(generally those in fast-growing urban zones) have been evicted to make way for a shiny new development funded
and built by a consortium of local party officials and big-money types (often overseas Chinese from Hong Kong,
Taiwan, or elsewhere).
The same four structural flaws outlined above haunt the country's efforts to save the country from
environmental catastrophe:
inaccurate or politically manipulated data
lack of an independent, widely distributed free press
pervasive corruption powered by the personal
aggrandizement of Party officials and big-money investors
no agency or independent judiciary with power to enforce rule of law, e.g. punish or restrain
the powerful when they break the rules.
China's industrial development poses one last great question: are there enough resources left on this planet
to feed, cloth, house, transport and entertain another billion voracious consumers?
If you include India
as a rapidly developing great power, then the number increases to 2 billion--roughly twice the populations of
Western Europe, North America and Japan combined.
(graph from the World Wildlife Fund's
Living Planet Report)
The above graph suggests not.
In other words, China's development is straining the limits not just of
its own territory and resources, but of the entire planet.
In street parlance, it appears the leadership of both China and India blew it by pursuing a centralized, Socialist template
of development and (until relatively recently), unconstrained population
growth. Having squandered the critical forty years (roughly 1950 - 1990)
following their independence, both nations now find themselves, in the big picture of energy and resources,
too late to the game.
The solution is to learn to do more with much less energy, and do so quickly.
Unfortunately, both nations'
leaders feel the need to expend precious resources on "big power" displays such as blue water navies,
space flights, etc. With a demographic storm brewing just over the horizon, they may soon find that prestige goods
like aircraft carriers and vast submarine fleets are luxuries their nations can ill afford.
Demographics
The cliche is "It's all economics;" this can also be expressed as "follow the money," or "It's the economy, stupid."
But the real story is: it's all Demographics.
China's population is ageing rapidly as the 400 million-strong
generation born in the 50s and 60s moves into retirement age. In the context of the war-torn
generation before them and the smaller "one child per family" generation after them, this huge group of people
forms a "pig in the python" demographic.
Their parents, impoverished by "The Great Leap Forward" and then The Cultural Revolution, could not save enough
to invest for their own retirement, let alone that of their offspring. Nor can the smaller generation of
current workers possibly produce enough to fund the retirement of 400 million elders and then save for their own
retirement.
This demographic dilemma is one shared by much of the world,
(link is to a U.N. report) including developed nations such as the U.S. Japan
and the E.U., and other developing countries such as Mexico. Increased education and opportunity have led to
lower birthrates, lower infant mortality and longer lives, all positive trends which exacerbate the problem
now facing the global community:
how can today's workers fund the retirement of so many elders?
The short answer is: they can't.
When retirement programs such as Social Security were established in the West
(and in Japan after the war), the ratio of workers to retirees was on the order of 15 to 1, and lifespans were
approximately 62 - 65 years. In other words, few people lived more than a few years beyond their retirement.
The ratio of workers to retirees is slowly but inexorably dropping to an unsustainable 2 to 1 or even
less in much of the developed world, even as average lifespans approach 80 years or more.
This demographic crunch
will be especially difficult in countries with low birthrates and minimal immigration, which includes Japan,
Russia and much of Europe; the U.S. will fare a bit better due to high immigration and a somewhat higher birthrate.
Although it isn't a popular topic, this guarantees that the social net so prized by the citizens of these
nations will either collapse or change drastically to align with the reality of too many retirees and too
few workers to support them.
The problem is difficult enough for wealthy nations with productive infrastructures in place. It will be
much worse for countries such as China with overwhelming infrastructure needs.
China will be fortunate to
find the capital and resources to clean up the nation's air and water, develop alternative energy sources and
solve a host of other pressing economic and environmental problems (not to mention modernizing its huge military
and other "big power" goals), much less fund the health care and retirement of 400 million elderly citizens.
China also faces a demographic found only in societies which favor males over females:
a shortage of young women. Due to selective abortion and health care, the ratio at birth of boys to girls
in China is 1.12. Thus there are 17 million more boys than girls (ages 0-14) in China. (according to the
C.I.A. World Factbook).
As a result,
some men who might want to marry will be unable to find a mate, and factories which depend on cheap female labor
from the countryside will find themselves short of workers. Such worker shortages are already being reported
in the official Chinese press.
The combination of poor air and water quality and an ageing population add up to huge demands for health care,
even as the public health care system in China has been eroded by government budget constraints and moves
to a market economy. While it's certainly possible to provide minimal health care benefits for such a vast
population of the elderly, such a system would strain the resources of the wealthiest nations. Indeed, it is
widely understood (if not publicly stated) that it's not the Social Security system which will bankrupt the U.S.
government within the next 30 years, but Medicare (health care for the aged).
China's rapidly growing population of elderly and its shortage of young workers will strain whatever social contract
is currently in place, and make it more difficult for the central government to fund much-needed
programs to build a sustainable economy.
Here's
another succinct summary of the demographic challenge China faces.
There are other issues which will exacerbate the demographic and health care challenges: the trend toward
starting families later, the health costs (in obesity, heart disease, etc.) associated with
the higher fat diet and more sedentary lifestyle of the affluent young, and most painfully, perhaps,
the burden placed on the offspring of single-child families as married couples must face caring for four
elderly parents without the aid of siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins.
Pensions based on large state-run businesses have evaporated as the state-run firms have been closed or
sold off, and there is no money to replace them with a centrally funded, Social-Security type retirement system.
Prior to the massive changes wrought by China's transition to a global economy, the average worker at a
state-owned factory (which was of course all of them) could look forward to a modest pension. The state-owned
firms often ran deficits, but then the central government shunted those deficits out of sight by guaranteeing
loans to the factories from state-owned banks.
It was a closed system. Citizens with nowhere to spend or invest their money put their savings in a state-owned
bank, which then lent this cash to the state-owned factories to cover their operating deficits, knowing full well
that the loans (or even the interest) would never be paid.
But as the inefficiencies of state-run companies ballooned, the deficits could no longer be covered by the
sham loans.
Saddled with an ever-mounting weight of non-performing loans, the banks required huge infusions
of government capital just to appear solvent.
In response, the central government began closing the money-losing state-owned factories, either shuttering
them for good or auctioning them off to foreign banking consortiums for pennies on the dollar.
Needless to
say, the foreign banks refused to take on either the pensions or the tens of thousands of workers. It was not
uncommon for a factory to have been squeezed down to 400 workers while the number of pensioners exceeded 10,000.
The absence of a truly centralized pension system for retired workers is now haunting the nation.
What seemed like a reasonable system in the 60s has crumbled, leaving the worst of
both socialist and market-economy worlds: a failed socialist plan which has left millions of ageing workers with no pensions,
and state banks burdened with hundreds of billions in bad debt, i.e. non-performing loans, which
are inhibiting their transition to market economy lenders.
This enormous mountain of bad debt--in typical fashion, no one really knows its full extent--has distorted the
entire financial sector of the economy, setting it up for a potentially devastating decline or collapse.
The Risks of a Financial Meltdown
The seeds of af an investment bubble and subsequent financial meltdown are already in place.
Although the Chinese economy is enormously complex, the primary danger can be summed up very simply: there is too much
money pouring into the country to be wisely invested. As Japan so aptly proved circa 1989-90, too much money leads
to a property bubble and subsequent crash (more obliquely known in some circles as a "hard landing"). The example
of Japan is not a perfect analogy, of course, but it does show that such crashes can cripple a country for years
or even decades.
The flood of cash comes from multiple sources:
direct foreign investment of over $60 billion a year from foreign corporations
loans from organizations such as the World Bank
"hot money" flowing in to take advantage of a devaluation in the yuan
(the fancy name is currency arbitrage), often from overseas Chinese
the prodigious savings of the Chinese citizenry
the recycling of the
$160 billion trade surplus with the U.S.
through low-interest loans made by state banks
re-investment of profits made by foreign corporations operating in China
investments made by Chinese companies and investors
The picture is complex, but the bottom line is: with gobs of cash to loan at low interest rates,
China's banking system can't help but misallocate vast sums of money into failing firms and overheated sectors.
Subsidized loans continue to
go to failing state-owned enterprises (SOEs)
and sectors such as real estate and steel which are prone to
a boom-bust cycle of overinvestment and crash. Cheap and easy money feeds this cycle, because companies
are operating in a world of such low interest that there is basically no cost of capital. The cost of this
orgy of cheap borrowing is borne by savers drawing pathetically low interest on their money.
There are huge incentives for failing SOEs and other firms to "borrow their way" out of bankruptcy
--
that is, to borrow enough money (at low interest rates) to fund their interest payments, and to expand their
production to "produce their way to profitability." Of course if their competitors do the same, then prices
fall and no one makes a profit--exactly what is happening in industry after industry in China: cell phones,
televisions, etc.
Such profligate loans to struggling companies benefit the government in two ways:
they support employment
of hungry workers, and they allow the government to put off the day of reckoning. That is, the day when the state
banks have to truly write off all the non-performing loans (NPLs), not just the official total of $230 billion.
The actual number is estimated to be twice that or even more--conservatively, $500 billion.
To quote from Prof. Chun Chang's report for the Federal Reserve Bank
"Progress and Peril in
China's Modern Economy"
:
According to some estimates, Chinese bad bank loans are as high as 40 percent of the nation's GDP.
(For context, bad bank loans during the U.S. savings and loan crisis represented just 2 percent of U.S. GDP.)
But SOCBs cannot force SOEs to pay back their loansindeed, they've continued to lend to themwithout causing
their collapse and the inevitable political crisis that would ensue. (While the high level of nonperforming
loans held by SOCBs would ordinarily lead to bank collapse, the pressure has been relieved to some degree by
the monopoly that state banks hold on the savings deposits of Chinese households.)
Why doesn't the government just "get it over with" and clean up the state banking sector once and for all?
One reason is that the true liquidation of bad debt would wipe out the majority of its $600 billion horde of foreign
reserves.
Another is that the state has a
creaky tax base.
Unlike Western governments,
China has an antiquated, confusing tax collection system; the vast majority of citizens pay nothing, and those who should pay have
myriad ways to evade their fair share--cash accounting, bribing of officials, etc. Even though tax revenues
have increased dramatically the past five years--even leading to articles entitled,
"Is China Overtaxed?"
,
tax revenues have fallen from 35% of gross domestic product in 1978 to 17%, while
deficit spending
is on the rise
.
As a result of corruption and the need to continue funding SOEs, the government has little choice but to keep the tottering
system of bad debt afloat with more loans.
It's a Hobson's Choice in a way--either tax the nation to pay
off the accumulated half-trillion in bad debt (which was spent propping up state-owned companies), or keep
the system afloat with more cheap and easy money in the hopes that whittling away the NPLs (non-performing loans)
will overcome the system's underlying weakness.
But the problem isn't just old debt--it's the lavishing of new bad debt.
And since China's internal capital
market is sheltered, there are no external market pressures to improve the loan portfolio or fundamentally
change the structural incentives to make more bad loans.
In a healthy financial system, the stock market provides an alternative form of financing for companies both
new and established. Unfortunately, China's stock markets are "fixed" by the government, which owns 2/3 of the
stock.
As a result, it's a fool's bet to buy stock in Chinese companies; if the government unloads even a part of its
massive stock holdings, prices would immediately sink. The government was hoping, of course, for gullible
investors to keep buying chunks of its companies for high prices, but the average Chinese investor has lost
faith in such a rigged stock market.
This failure to establish a fair and transparent stock market has another cost:
new companies can't
raise funds through IPOs as they can in the West. As a consequence, companies with legitimate need for new
capital must turn to the banking system for money--the very system which favors state-owned firms and
those with appropriate connections. As in Japan, many small firms are starved for
capital while large companies have more money than they can efficiently invest.
With money flowing so freely, the temptation is to invest it in "safe sectors" like property development.
This herd mentality sets up a bubble in property valuations--
exactly what we're seeing
worldwide, including China.
It is certainly true that China's popluation of 1.2 billion can use another 100 million new
housing units--but the question is, at what cost? The per capita income in China is still only $1,200 per year,
compared to $40,000 in the U.S. While there's more than enough money to build a 100 million units of housing,
are there enough people who can afford to buy them?
I personally know of middle-class people in China owning three apartments--one for themselves and two for investment.
These are not wealthy people, just folks with decent government or private sector jobs. Extrapolate that
number of "investment apartments" by millions, and you discern the outlines of a classic property bust:
everybody's into the game because "you can't lose" and "prices just keep going up every year."
This sets up a boom in which housing and office towers are over-built, creating a supply which outstrips the
demand of non-investor buyers. At some point a panic ensues (there can be any number of triggers), and
some percentage of those vacant or rented apartments come on the market. Prices soften and then drop, causing
worried investors to race to sell before the bottom drops out--causing, of course, the bottom to drop out.
The key to this cycle is the unwavering confidence of the investor.
Supreme confidence and easy credit
always mark the top of any boom-bust cycle--and the world remains exceptionally euphoric about China's
growth prospects. In China, however, many are fearful of such speculation and overinvestment;
"Fears Rise Over Property Bubble."
China's financial problems are not just of its own making. There are global forces at work which no
government can entirely control.
Indeed, China's flood of cheap capital can be traced back to the U.S.
Federal Reserve's decision to blast away a regular business-cycle recession after 9/11 with basically unlimited
liquidity and super-low interest rates.
The Fed effectively exported these lows rates to the rest of our trading partners via this mechanism:
mobile
capital flows to the highest return, strengthening that nation's currency. Since none of the U.S. trading partners
wanted a stronger currency, as that would stifle their exports to the U.S., everyone else cut their rates as well.
(Those that didn't, such as South Africa, have seen their currency strengthen to painful levels.)
All this "free money" triggered a housing boom in the U.S.
(and in the rest of the world as well, except for
Japan and Germany), enabling U.S. consumers to borrow money from their home equity to spend on consumer goods.
Voila, the U.S. current account deficit (the trade deficit) with the rest of the world balloons to $660 billion,
and the trade deficit with China suddenly doubles.
And that's all China's fault, right? Not really.
As certain members of the Fed never tire of repeating,
the problem isn't hyper-active U.S. consumers but the surplus of savings around the world looking for a safe
and profitable home. If their own country's growth prospects were good, then this capital would be invested
at home. But alas, most of the world's economies labor under structural and political liabilities which have
constricted their growth. As a result, money flows into the "safe," higher-growth economies: the U.S. and China.
These inflows of global capital have created the current imbalances.
The money pouring into U.S. treasuries and
other bonds funds our huge trade imbalance, while the money flooding into China fuels their manufacturing
and property boom. All those manufactured goods flow to markets where growth is good, which at this point
is the U.S.
The big hullabaloo about China re-jiggering its currency peg is "much ado about nothing." Changing the
yuan peg to the dollar will have little effect on the current account imbalance.
The reasons are numerous.
One is that many Chinese firms compete only with other Chinese firms, so the exchange rate adjustment won't
boost U.S. competitors--they're aren't any. Where there are U.S. competitors, such as Motorola in cellphones,
their competition are other multinationals such as Samsung and Nokia, who produce phones in China but price
their globally marketed products (and pocket the profits) in other currencies.
The benefits of this trade imbalance actually flow largely to U.S. corporations, not China.
Have you
ever wondered how U.S. corporations such as Wal-Mart can keep boosting their profits by 20%
per year, year over year, despite mediocre sales increases? Or how is it that U.S. corporations are sitting
on an unprecedented amount of cash (over $1 trillion and counting)?
Do you think it has something to do with them paying Chinese workers $120 a month to manufacture many of
their products, which they then market to the rest of the world (including you) at a hefty profit?
The
answer is yes. Many Chinese companies are squeezed by competition with their peers to the point that
profits are low (2 to 4%) or non-existent.
In the developing world, formidable obstacles stand in the way of companies attempting to become world-class
multinationals--
including China.
Successful
global corporations require more than just hard workers and inexpensive capital; they must nurture, over decades
of experience, deep managerial expertise and an obsession with quality. Currently, no Chinese corporations
can yet match the managerial, manufacturing, marketing and R&D depth of a Sony, Toyota, Samsung, Mororola, IBM,
Microsoft or Intel.
Most of China's exports are made for foreign companies, and the profits flow to these companies, not the
Chinese manufacturers.
So before you buy into the argument that the U.S is the loser in the trade
imbalance with China, consider who's actually raking in the enormous profits.
Recreating Silicon Valley isn't that easy, either.
Silicon Valley is more than a cluster of buildings wired with fiber-optic cables. It is fundamentally a
collaboration between research universities, entrepreneurs, venture capital and the U.S. government in which
information flows freely because intellectual capital is vigorously protected by U.S. patent and trade law.
Few developing nations can reproduce this precise mix--and so there remains one Silicon Valley and a number of
small U.S. wannabes, and a bunch of half-empty business parks around the world with
cheesy nicknames copycatting the phrase "Silicon X" (Alley, Triangle, Ditch, Jungle, Desert, etc.)
Rather than view China and the U.S. as economic adversaries, it might be more accurate to see both nations
as victims of their own successes.
If China didn't have such a vast pool of hard workers and such a strong
entrepreneural history and spirit, then perhaps it wouldn't be attracting such dangerously abundant global capital.
And if other countries
were growing at the same pace as the U.S., then the U.S. wouldn't be such a magnet for capital seeking a safe
refuge.
The Way Forward
Everything you can say about China is true--and therein lies the difficulty.
It's true that the central
government is trying to clean up the banking sector, but it's also true that it's not doing so with any great success.
It's true that environmental issues are being addressed, often quite successfully--but it's also true that
many other ecological problems are languishing out of the spotlight. It's true that the majority of people are much better
off in terms of material goods and opportunities--but it's also true that tens of millions are very poor (even
in Shanghai many people make a living hauling rubbish in wooden pullcarts), and the basics such as clean air are
beyond the reach of even the wealthy.
The
nouveau riche
young sport expensive cellphones and walk away from banquet meals loaded with untouched food, flaunting
a decadent excess certainly equal to any in the world; such wealth is the envy of the developing world.
But if just breathing the air of your city is the equivalent of smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarets a day--is that wealth, or wealth squandered?
The Chinese culture has proven itself pragmatic and adaptable over the centuries--but its political leadership
has led it to near-ruin twice in the past fifty years. The central government is strong and vigorous enough to enact change, but
the corruption in its ranks obstructs fundamental improvements in efficiency and fairness.
Every society can be viewed as an ecology of sorts--a complex interaction of history, tradition, ethics, religion,
landscape, resources, military might, technology, trade, myths, art, politics, law and finance. Those societies
which are rigid and ill-adapted to an era fail their people, while those still supple and adaptable find a way to
overcome crises and reach new heights of opportunity and prosperity.
Although some will say it is too early to tell--never mind the endless examples--rigid central planning and
deeply corrupt societies have not fared well in our era. As the Soviets so effectively proved, you cannot
steal your way to innovation or long-term prosperity, or distract your people with external enemies forever,
or despoil your environment without permanent damage to your landscape and economy. You cannot place
personal aggrandisement above the law without destroying people's faith in fair and just government.
The path forward for China thus seems clear. Forces powerful enough to balance government excess and corruption
must be nurtured: a largely free and open press and an independent judicial system. The press needn't be
free to challenge the legitimacy of the Party, but it must be
be free enough to scrutinize favoritism and root out abuses of the shared environment. Shouldn't the People be more important
than any official? It seems an easy fit for Communist ideology.
I know of no ideological reason why the Communist Party and central government couldn't foster
these essential institutions within the existing power structure.
The question, however, remains: can China's political structural impediments be overcome?
Given the pervasive reach of corruption, it must be asked: perhaps the State isn't just corrupt;
perhaps the State
is
corruption.
If that turns out to be the case, then reform will remain
purposefully ineffective; like a press which appears free but is not, the "reforms" may be only
a simulacrum of change. It may well be that Party leaders are sincere about reform, but the nature of the
Party and State precludes the type of deep transformation the nation's political structure so desperately needs
to truly serve the people.
It is not "China-bashing" to pose this question; indeed, no serious student of China (or Chinese history) can
avoid the query, for there is no history of political oligarchies successfully reforming themselves from within.
If the Chinese leadership is, as Orville Schell puts it, a "Mandarinate," and, as other books suggest, a
Mandarinate not particularly interested in the views or concerns of the nation's citizenry, then such a
transformation appears--at least from the long view of history--unlikely.
Reform rises from bodies of government which reflect and embody the concerns of the common citizen,
not the elite oligarchy; in the West, there are three such bodies: an unfettered, probing, even pugnacious press,
the popularly elected legislature and the
independent courts. (A trustworthy law enforcement arm is also necessary.) Only in such a widely
representational system can the second-highest
official in the F.B.I., an independent judiciary and a widely-distributed free press bring down a corrupt
administration, and then change the balance of power in the legislative leadership. I refer of course to Watergate,
the most serious attempt to corrupt the U.S. government in our country's history.
Certain cultural issues overhang any sincere attempt at reforming corruption as well. The citizens of nations
with a tightly controlled media quite naturally tend to think alike; in China, such uniformity of thought has been
both a norm and a virtue. While the proliferation of environmental and other non-governmental groups in
China reflect a growing diversity of opinion, the majority of citizens still respond in Pavlovian fashion to the
State media's nationalism.
Another pan-Asian cultural trait which inhibits national reform is the tendency to "mind your own business,"
which boils down to ignoring problems if they do not affect you or your family directly. This does not
encourage common cause on regional or national concerns such as air pollution or water quality.
A related pan-Asian cultural norm is to view the environment as a resource for human exploitation, and as a
dumping ground. I can attest first-hand that rubbish and pollutants needlessly foul the beaches of Japan and the rivers and shorelines
of Thailand and China. While some suggest that as nations grow wealthier, their environments grow cleaner,
that was certainly not the case in the centrally-controlled Soviet republics. It would be false, then, to
assume than rising wealth necessarily transforms a nation into an environmentally sensitive society. While
prosperity may be one factor of many, it cannot replace cultural and educational transformation.
The Illusion of Control
The central government's primary concern is "stability"--but how much of China's future does
the government and the Party truly control?
Three areas may already be beyond the State's control:
environmental degradation, the emergence of religion, especially Christianity, and the appeal of social protests.
While one might assume that the central government has the power to change course midstream and radically change
the culture of waste which has spoiled China's air, water and landscape. But Nature is a tangle of
many feedback loops, many of which interact. Thus desertification, dropping water tables, dust storms
and climate change are interconnected problems which may not be solved by planting windbreaks. Moving factories away
from Beijing may reduce air pollution locally, but only at the cost of degrading the air elsewhere. Scrubbers
can remove particulates from coal-fired power plants, but only if the catalytic elements are properly
maintained and periodically replaced.
Environmental transformation requires resolving two key structural deficiencies: accurate data must be collected
and disseminated without political interference or editing, and regulations must be obeyed rather than skirted.
In other words, the policies and regulations may be strict, but if the enforcement and data collection are not
equally strict, the policies will inevitably fail.
Environmental reform thus rests entirely on political reform.
The spiritual hunger of a human populace should not be underestimated.
The rise of "officially sanctioned"
places of worship in China has been remarkable; while this appears to be a small part of Chinese national life at
the moment, the growth of "informal" religious groups and gatherings, especially those under the Christian banner,
are difficult to assess.
While some in the U.S. hope for a religious transformation in China, others are
confident that the Chinese culture is immune to fundamental spiritual change. Such slow cultural
movements cannot be accurately predicted; it may be that the spiritual vacuum left by the demise of Communist
ideology--what faith could survive the dual disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution?--awaits filling by one religion or another. It was, after all, fear of such a spiritual force which
led the Chinese Communist Party to evict all Christian missionaries, just as the Japanese Shogunate had done
in 17th century Japan.
The ubiquity of both spontaneous and organized social protests suggests such public dissatisfaction may already lay
beyond the reach of the central government.
Well-heeled condominium owners in Beijing know what to
do when a developer threatens to block
their view; they assemble a visible protest and demand results. Farmers too know what moves the authorities--a
public protest which cannot be easily suppressed. It has been widely noted that the government may have
unleashed a force which is now beyond their control in allowing (or encouraging) violent nationalistic
protests and in succoring middle-class protests from property owners and nascent environmentalists.
One essential to China's economic success is assuredly beyond any government's control: access and ownership
of the resources required to support a billion people with middle-class aspirations.
Though the
Chinese government is securing petroleum assets wherever it can find them--unsavory African regimes such as
Sudan top the list of its new oil-rich "friends"--the majority of the world's petroleum is controlled by the West or
Mideast governments without natural or historical ties with China. Other resources such as iron ore lay in
unstable countries in Africa or firmly Western nations such as Australia.
China's courting of corrupt and venal
African leaders is no different than Western nations' courting of corrupt and venal African leaders--but they have not
yet discovered that such leaders have a habit of being overthrown. The tyrants' allies--in this case, China--often
find that their influence wanes along with their friends' dictatorship. Indeed, great powers have been thrown out
of smaller nations with alarming ease: the Soviets built the Aswan Dam, and what did they receive for their
troubles?
While any resource can be purchased on the open market, growing demand from China itself virtually guarantees
that prices for the essentials of industrialization will rise along with demand. China is thus being forced to
compete with other industrializing nations (India, Vietnam, etc.) and the wealthy West for the resources
needed to fuel its spectacular growth. To meet the aspirations of its people, China will have to control or buy
an enormous share of the world's natural resources.
If, as appears likely (see above chart on the ecological footprint of humanity), there simply isn't enough
for another billion middle-class folks, then the poorer citizens of China may find themselves
priced out of the marketplace. What social and political repercussions that competition might spawn are
unknown, but it is assuredly a challenge to the continued growth and stability of every nation--including China.
4/9/06: New link to an important article by Minxin Pei:
"The dark side of China's dazzling economic boom:
Hype conceals often sordid reality of government corruption and cronyism"
.
The piece outlines the same themes which have been described at length above, and adds a
incisive political analysis: the neo-Leninist central government has co-opted the intelligensia
with plum positions and stipends, fending off the natural source of political reform.
Such a neo-Leninist state must hold the levers of the economy in order to pass out
the rewards and spoils which ensure loyalty or at least consent of the military, Party and
other centers of power. In other words, there is a political limit to free enterprise in
China which is not understood in the West.
© copyright 2005-6 by charles hugh smith, all rights reserved in all media.
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Updated: April 9, 2006