The ground beneath China’s feet

One such proponent is Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author of The Beijing Consensus, a study recently published by the UK-based Foreign Policy Centre. 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 favoured entrepreneurs. He Qinglian’s book, China’s Pitfall, is a damning indictment of the system. Commenting on its mainly urban boom of ’90s, she wrote this was “a process in which power-holders and their hangers-on plundered public wealth”. It sounds very much like the Russian experience. Another Chinese writer, Professor 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 values and traditions.

The resultant picture is, therefore, terribly depressing reflected in the widening urban-rural income disparities, the migration of an ever-increasing rural population (estimated anywhere between 100 to 150 million and growing by 10 million a year) looking for jobs in the cities and their exploitation and exclusion from social services, growing urban unemployment with virtually non-existent social benefits and rising crime generally pinned on migrants.

In a report on China’s migrant labor, Anthony Kuhn quoted a construction worker to say, “They (employers) rip off your labour, and they rip off your skin.” And even refuse to pay wages. According to the official Beijing Review, 72.5 per cent of the country’s migrant workers are owed wages amounting to more than $12 billion. To applaud such a socially rapacious system as an alternative model of development is beyond comprehension.

But the Chinese 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 testimonials from foreign experts like Ramo only reinforce this view. 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 a popular mandate. On the contrary: it goes to great lengths to sniff out even the remotest challenge to its political monopoly.

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. Against this backdrop, it is foolish to talk of China as an alternative economic and political model.