Reality of China: A Mess of Wanton Graffiti Drawn with the Pen of Power
By He Qinglian on November 3, 2011
I remember when Mao Zedong came to be
the ruler of China, he described the country as a destitute state, a
sheet of blank paper on which the newest and most beautiful picture
can be drawn. After that, for three decades Mao Zedong ruled and he
left on China his powerful drawings, done in a manner that was
willful and wild. In the three decades that followed, officials at
various levels at the central and local governments have been
painting the country with a host of methods at will. Now, with little
white space left, the drawings on the blank sheet of China are
testing the lowest limits of human esthetic values and moral
principles.
Is China rich or poor?
This is probably the first question
that baffles international observers. Up to now, China has yet to
take the initiative to wave goodbye the status of a developing
nation, even though the size of its economy is large enough to be
dazzling: it’s the second largest economy by GDP ranking, and has
$3.2 trillion in its foreign reserves. The government is so
unbelievably wealthy—the wealthiest among countries across the
globe given the fact that it takes away a third from that staggering
volume of GDP—that not long ago, the European Union, an important
member of the club of wealthy nations, has wished that China would
take out one trillion to help save it from crisis. But it is also
true to say that China is poor, as there are still over 150 million
people living under the absolute poverty line, being able to spend
only a dollar per day. This is what I called as “wealthy government
and poor people” years ago.
Even in countries which autocratic regimes that
have collapsed during the Arab Spring this year (2011)
such as Tunisia and Libya, the social welfare there were different
from China, those governments didn’t take away as large a share
from the GDP as Beijing does, and the welfare for the impoverished
were much better than in China.
Current situation in China's
challenges a variety of economic theories
The role China plays in international
economic landscape defies accurate pinpoint of its status. It’s
true to say China is a developed nation, since at least China’s
commodity prices, be it viewed from purchasing power parity or other
criteria, or when it comes to the prices of housing, oil or meat,
milk, grain and vegetables and other daily consumer goods, have
surpassed the world’s number one, the United States. The only
difference is China has yet to be able to export high technology
goods like all developed nations do. But it's also not wrong to say
China is a developing country, as it now exports neither resources
nor produces. On the contrary, it became the world’s largest
importer of resources and food. Apart from rich countries like
Canada, Australia and poor countries in Africa and Latin America
which have to provide China with all sorts of mineral resources, the
world’s number one, the United States, also has to export to China
maize, soybeans, pork, unpolluted fish, and even rice. If viewed with
the dependency theory, which the Leftists and the Neo-Leftists see as
the bible, the countries mentioned above, whether they are rich or
poor, have all ended up as vassals of China’s economy, allowing
China to extract the remainders out of them.
What sort of position does China want
in the international economic setting? I recall that thirty years ago
when China just opened its market, it was very ambitious.
Wholeheartedly determined to exchange the market for technologies so
as to change the situation that numerous pairs of sports shoes were
exported before a Boeing jet could be purchased, the country saw the
export of low-end production like labor-intensive processing as an
expedient measure, and it obtained intellectual properties by such
means as stealing and grabbing—practices that deeply annoyed
countries like the United States and Germany, which could do nothing.
The Chinese government had at a point
seen industrial restructuring as a direction. The public was very
excited about it. And what happened? Up to now, not only has the
government failed to shift the industrial structure to one that is
technology-intensive, but it also degraded into inferior products the
labor-intensive goods like toys and electronic products which in the
past had the largest share of the world’s market. Now their market
share is shrinking fast.
It would not be right to say China’s
falling behind in technologies, as the country has in successive
years sent into space rockets including Shenzhou-5 and Shenzhou-6; it
even sent up a spaceship, Tiangong-1. Despite all these
achievements, the country just wouldn’t produce milk powder that
meets the standards for the people to consume. In the end the problem
was set aside by lowering the milk powder standards. And it seems
China willingly turns its land into a shelter for polluting
industries. China’s coal mining, chemical industries, metallurgy,
production of electricity, of construction materials, of electronics,
and light industries are where high occurrence of occupational
diseases have been logged; over 200 million people are exposed to the
hazard of occupational diseases. Although there has been a swift
increase in the international market share of several products, such
as petrochemical products like PX (the amount of which produced in
China topped the world since 2009, and accounted for nearly a quarter
of the world's total production in 2010) and rare earth, their
production process caused severe pollution. As these industries
became the pillars of China's economy, protests against pollution
gradually became the third largest category of mass incidents in the
country. All that's left as China's advantage, it seems, is that [the
government] couldn't care less about pollution. [Sadly, all those
environment experts who have been to China for field studies would
realize the country's environment has already collapsed.]
China's current situation also
challenges the macroeconomic theory. It's not wrong to say the
country is growing fast—at a rate that is unrivaled in the world's
economic history. China has proudly said to the world that it
maintained the growth rate at above 8% for nearly thirty years in a
row, which is a record that no other country has ever been able to
keep. According to the traditional macroeconomic theory, economic
growth is bound to promote growth in employment and consumption, as
proven by years of economic development in countries like the United
States and European Union member states. But China's situation has
been very unique. Despite a growth rate this high, growth in
employment and consumption were not boosted. The growth rate for
employment has been hovering at 1-2% since the late 1990s, and
consumption rate (consumption to GDP ratio) has been falling year
after year and dropped to 37.3% in 2009, lower than the world's
average of about 40%. This gross mismatch in China's macroeconomic
data presents serious challenges to the macroeconomic theory that was
originated from the West.
In sum, there is no readily available
theory that can explain the current economic situation in China. It's
also hard to categorize China as a developed nation or a developing
one according to existing standards. And China actually quite like
this ambiguity, which enables it to flexibly shift its status. When
the country needs the power of discourse, it would identify itself as
a developed nation; and when it wants to shrink from duties that it
is expected to fulfill, it would call itself a developing country.
Testing the lowest limit of human
political ethics
If it is said that the achievements
made in the first ten years of China's economic reform in the past
three decades relied mainly on the devolution of power, the
development of diverse forms of ownership, and the promotion of
state-owned enterprises reform, then through what channels exactly
did China obtain its stunning accomplishments in the two decades that
followed?
If you ask the Chinese what is the
pillar industry in China, undoubtedly most would say that it's the
real estate. I'd add another answer to that question: resource
industries, or mining industries which is dominated by coal mining.
In my article published in 2008, “Three decades of reform: abnormal development of national capacity and its consequences”,
I made it very clear that since the mid-1990s, China's economic growth
has relied mainly on such major sections as real estate, mining, and
capital markets like the stock market; and it was from these areas
that the government has been extracting resources. The real estate
development provided local governments with massive tax revenue, it
also gave birth to a large number of real estate rich, over 120
million landless peasants, more than three million city-dwelling
households which fell victim to forced eviction and the world's
highest property price.
The GDP the mining industries
contributed to China became known as “blood-stained GDP”. No one
could tell how many miners had their health and lives devoured by the
industry that gave rise to a new one which exists in nowhere else:
the industry of “pig slaughtering”: individuals who had no
humanity left in them enticed others into working as miners, and then
set up scenes of accident to take the lives of those miners when
opportunity arose; afterward, they blackmailed the mine owners for
compensation by claiming to be relatives of the victims. These cruel
incidents repeatedly occurred at Chinese mines in recent years.
These two pillar industries were
founded on the sacrifice of the right to live of countless Chinese.
Incessant incidents of self-immolation and protests across the
country could not stop local governments from carrying out forced
demolition and eviction [to make way for new property projects]. And
the tragic story of a worker who contracted severe pneumoconiosis was
forced to ask a surgeon to cut open his chest to prove that he was
not infected with tuberculosis so as to get the compensation he
deserved would be something that happened only in China. Recently,
Guangming Daily published an article stating that every day twenty
administrative villages disappeared in China, and expressed its
worries that people would no longer grow crops. Yet what I saw was
peasants with no land to farm on, no prospect for employment and no
place to go were being produced in bulk each day. By now there are,
as I calculated, about 130 million such peasants.
By making use of the power of the
regime to plunder from the people living resources and health, [the
culprits] could as well be seen as presenting powerful challenges
against the lowest limit of human political ethics.
Challenging against the lowest limit
of human ecological safety
What have become of the sky, the earth,
and the people, which were seen collectively as the “three powers”
in traditional Chinese culture?
The Sky. It is said that most cities in
China could no longer see blue sky, which has long been covered with
haze and smog. According to the estimate by the Chinese Academy for
Environmental Planning, more than 400,000 people died from air
pollution-related diseases in China each year. In 2006, a report by
the World Bank put the figure of such deaths at 750,000, and was
lowered to over 400,000 at the request of the Chinese government for
social stability reasons.
The earth. It has been devastated
beyond repair. I'm not going to enumerate data relating to water
pollution and land contamination here. After the mudslide in Zhouqu,
Gansu last year, the Chinese government has finally admitted that the
calamity was resulted from nature's revenge on human for
over-exploitation. The China Institute of Geological Environmental
Monitoring revealed data that suggested the land on which the Chinese
people live is no longer safe: a total of 26,009 geological disasters
was recorded from January to July in 2010, nearly ten times as many
during the same period in 2009. A total of 200,000 potential
geological disaster points has been discovered nationwide. Among
them, 16,000 are classified as large and extra large potential
geological disaster points similar to Zhouqu. Blood-stained GDP is
getting difficult to sustain. According to official figure, there are
already forty-four cities depleted of their resources. The major
coal-producing province of Shanxi has up to 10,000-plus square
kilometers of mined-out underground area, above one-tenth of the size
of that province. Collapse has occurred in more than half of that
mined-out area.
The people. Their overall health
conditions are not to be optimistic about. There are hundreds of
cancer villages across the country, the number of people suffering
from all kinds of occupational diseases is as many as 200 million,
not including those living with HIV, tuberculosis patients, hepatitis
B patients, and 120 million hepatitis B virus carriers. The Chinese
authorities also said that over 100 million people are mentally ill.
And as early as 2005, the Chinese
officials announced there were in total 180 million ecological
refugees.
A “blank sheet” on which wanton
graffiti has been made
A man without modern concept of wealth,
Mao Zedong said in the early days of CPC establishment of its rule
that China was poverty-stricken. He did not see the land of the
country, its water resource and environment as nonrenewable
resources most valuable to humankind.
In fact, it was the ecological
resources left behind by the old China—the poverty-stricken state
in the eyes of Mao Zedong—that supported CPC rule for over sixty
years, in particular the rapid economic growth in the past three
decades. The land resources supported the real estate development;
the water resources supported hydro-power projects like the one at
the Three Gorges; the various underground mineral resources
contributed to all kinds of blood-stained GDP; and the historical and
cultural heritage resources gave rise to booming tourism. Just look
at the land resources alone as evidence, in the twenty-one years from
1989 to 2010, the government revenue from land sales ballooned from
447 million in 1989 to over three trillion in 2010, that's a
6732-fold increase, and with that the proportion of revenue from land
sales in local revenue has been rising in tandem. In 1989 revenue
from land sales accounted for only 0.24% of local revenue. In 2010,
the ratio reached 74.14%, a 308-fold increase. The governments have
also become unprecedentedly cunning in extracting land values.
Although the housing property for those dwell in it should be valid
for seventy years, some of the local governments have already used
housing quality as an excuse to order advance demolition and
eviction. They even collect a mandatory renewal fee twenty years
after the dead were buried in a grave.
The biggest difference between this
dynasty and those of the past is that: at the times of those
dynasties , technological advancement was at a limited level. As a
result, the natural resources remained intact even though the
dynasties were toppled. However, during the sixty-odd years of
Communist rule, in particular the more recent three decades, huge
progress has been made in science and technology, providing the
technological means for extracting all kinds of resources to
depletion. As a result,
the “blank paper” seized with guns
is now plagued with various dirt marks that one would rather not
looking at, dirt marks left on it by officials at various levels
according to their esthetic ability and needs.
If it is said that over sixty years ago
the Nationalist government left behind in China a “poverty-stricken”
blank sheet, the various ecological resources were intact
nonetheless. In its pursuit of development at the expense of
ecological resources however, the CPC would leave behind for future
generations a wild mess laden with all sorts of graffiti and dirt
marks, and there would be no materials left for them to paint with.
