Capitol Ideas: A Different China
Bethell, Tom
by Tom Bethell A Different China American critics have this unfortunate blind spot... The changes in China in the last two decades have seen no precedent in the twentieth century. It is as though...
...Robert Novak wrote in June that "there is emotional opposition to breaking the link with Taiwan from Cardinal Ignatius Kung, the 92-year-old exiled archbishop of Shanghai, who now lives in Connecticut...
...There followed the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, in which she soon became enmeshed...
...At that point we may anticipate that economic growth will be tamed, the familiar trading bans on such beneficial goods as ivory and Freon will be restored, along with pollution-control devices, safety nets, perhaps even income redistribution...
...There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money...
...Life in the countryside was primitive: No electricity, running water, or toilets...
...The Western understanding of local government must also be rethought...
...The Cato Institute held conferences in Shanghai in 1988 and 1997...
...This time there was no public criticism of socialism, less interest in our speakers, a much tighter political situation...
...Despite software piracy, Microsoft has over thirty authorized training centers in China, and is treating the country "as a massive brain dump of everything we know," according to its director of China operations...
...In short, the country will rejoin the "international community...
...So the country would have to grow rich, free markets would have to be allowed, the disabling effects of state ownership overcome...
...In France (where the government has been unable to privatize Air France) Communists booed any suggestion that they might heed the Chinese example...
...But economic practice could diverge from theory to whatever extent was needed...
...Regulations are costly, in short, and profits from these enterprises must often be used to finance roads, clinics, and primary schools...
...Between 1978 and 1996, the percentage of the population in agriculture fell to 5o percent, from 75 percent...
...There are now about 2.5 million local enterprises operating under the umbrella of municipal governments, employing over 125 million people...
...Almost everyone was building a new house...
...The Chinese of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan had pointed the way...
...Writing in the Nation in 1995, Orville Schell drew a Gilderesque picture: "Driving in from the Shanghai airport is like being in one of those American children's workbooks in the thirties that boastfully limned futuristic landscapes filled with belching smokestacks, trains barreling down tracks to distant horizons, planes zooming overhead and freeways coursing through thickets of skyscrapers...
...The main complaint is that China is denied the blessings of democracy...
...As for the American chauvinists who live in dread of industrial espionage, they should have a word with Bill Gates...
...The Cultural Revolution had created such anarchy that the chain of command within the party was broken...
...It is intensified in China's case by the Vatican's continued recognition of Taiwan...
...In his speech to the group, the mayor of Shanghai showed an impressive understanding of markets and deregulation...
...The area devoted to farming also declined, as housing, offices, and factories expanded...
...The introduction of the direct election of village level officials since 1988 represents a major institutional breakthrough," Drew Liu wrote recently in the China Strategic Review...
...The land remained formally the inalienable property of the state...
...The rulers understood that democracy was not essential, and perhaps was an impediment to economic growth...
...When Kate Zhou returned to the village of her youth in 1982, it had changed beyond recognition...
...Talk of buying a TV and a small tractor preoccupied villagers...
...But in all candor, there was an energy and enthusiasm in 1988 that was lacking this year," Crane added...
...The Chinese leadership had grasped the truth of Samuel Johnson's maxim: TOM BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...In some prefectures, officials promised that the policy would not soon be changed...
...At the recent Party congress, Social Darwinism itself was not far from view...
...Economically, however, it was the equivalent of a system in which private property was restored...
...Linked with moneymaking was the rise in consumption...
...The belief that Rome-appointed bishops are loyal to a foreign power is an old story in the history of Catholicism...
...It is as though the ruling class and the Chinese people were as one in resolving to become the leading power in the world...
...Institute president Ed Crane noted the tremendous economic growth of the intervening years...
...The intellectuals will have been restored to power...
...But 20 million Muslims are more or less left alone, and Catholic difficulties would seem to be amenable to a diplomatic solution...
...The New York Times's picture of China is one of growing income inequality, of vast regions "left behind," of "many who remain dissatisfied...
...State enterprises were warned that Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" might apply to them...
...She worked in a factory, and soon learned to save her energy to stand in food queues for hours each day after work...
...A professor of comparative politics at the University of Hawaii, she must be one ofihe few academics who actually lived in rural China...
...Those who scorn "trade" and value political rights more highly than economic rights have failed to appreciate the point...
...All of which are elected by the direct ballots of 600 million peasants...
...Much power had already been ceded to the people —above all the right to work, to earn a living, to retain the fruits of labor...
...T he demarcation between public and private is not as clear cut in China as it is in the West...
...I know about the labor camps, and the religious persecution that some encounter...
...The Party understands that only if growth continues can it stay in power...
...Local government enterprises are said to be the closest thing to a market economy in China...
...Central control was gradually relaxed...
...Farm families began to 'bribe' their way out of collective chores by making deals with local cadres," Kate Zhou writes...
...And China is duly moving in a democratic direction...
...Farming teams divided themselves back into family units, and kept the surplus above the quota...
...A similar transformation in Japan took sixty years...
...The farmers had long-term leases, not fee-simple ownership...
...Endless the corruption, the pollution, the repression...
...Seymour Martin Lipset is no doubt correct that democracy is more a response to prosperity than a cause of it...
...If such changes are sustained for the next decade, the consequences will be felt around the world...
...For the last fifteen years their output has grown at the rate of 20 percent a year, twice the national average...
...Dinner conversations focused on making money...
...Able now to buy consumer goods, perhaps even an automobile, the people would relish the novelty of prosperity...
...An interesting account is to be found in Kate Xiao Thou How the Farmers Changed China (Westview Press, 1996...
...Once the quota had been 18 November 19 9 7 • The American Spectator met, the marginal tax rate was zero...
...04 20 November 1997 • The American Spectator...
...Often they have business partners in Hong Kong or Taiwan andtheir products must compete on the world market...
...Her father, a professor of English, was imprisoned as a bourgeois intellectual in 1966, and she was dispatched to live with a poor rural family...
...In the blinkered Business Week vision, foreign prosperity is seen mostly as hostile competition, wealth-creation as a zero-sum activity and construed as a challenge, not an opportunity...
...How did this happen...
...The economy has grown five times faster than that of the United States in the nineteenth century...
...The Washington Post has been more balanced...
...There was at least one bike in each family...
...It has given us the rage of the repressedintelligentsia, but also some good reporting, particularly from Steven Mufson...
...Above all China is seen as a place where intellectuals have been deprived of their rightful powers of agitation...
...Of such sentiments was World War I made...
...As to the lack of environmental controls: "Local governments face conflicts of interest as regulators and principal shareholders," Mufson wrote in the Post...
...In fact, the rise of China is probably fueling the economic boom right now...
...If it follows the path of Taiwan, as seems likely, China may well be democratic in a few years...
...I love the story of the dissident who for years was writing from prison that economic change was impossible without democracy...
...The city added Soo million square feet of office space in three years and one-fourth of the world's construction cranes are said to be operating there...
...But until that happens, let us rejoice that there is at least one country in the world where they are not in charge...
...To "peasants" so recently poor, these amenities have a higher value than the EPA's seal of approval...
...This was capitalism "of the rawest kind," said the Washington Post...
...And the surplus could be traded...
...The remarkable thing, unforeseen by Western elites and political theory, was that this happened under a Communist government...
...But there's no returning to Communism...
...Every family was engaged in market exchanges...
...The new policy spread beyond farming...
...We absolutely condemn the latest Chinese decisions," said a Communist member of the Italian parliament...
...The outline I have given here is not the "correct" one...
...Production rapidly increased, and when it came to the attention of Peking in 1978, the pragmatist Deng Xiaoping was content to let the system continue...
...We should recall that the whole world benefited from the growth of Japan in the 1970's and 1980's...
...The head of a family would promise to fulfill the production quota and gave the cadres a bit over...
...Since 1978, China has enjoyed the largest tax cuts and the highest economic growth rates in history, according to Alvin Rabushka of the Hoover Institution...
...There are in total 931,716 elected village committees, and four million elected village officials...
...Her essential claim is that the farmers ("peasants" in Communist lingo) led the way and the government followed...
...The senior official who sponsors a company's transit through the maze of Communist prohibitions in exchange for a slice of equity is "corrupt," but usually only to Westerners...
...In their current rigor mortis they are fully democratic...
...New millionaires, we read, "arouse resentment...
...But the people would pay them little heed...
...Intellectuals, of course, would be madly frustrated...
...They let him out to take a look for himself, and he returned to prison a wiser man...
...A new system evolved, from which first the farmers and then the country as a whole benefited greatly...
...To legitimize their hold on power, the Party kept the flag of socialism flying...
...Two steps forward, one step back...
...Following farm collectivization, perhaps 4o million people had died of starvation in the years 1959-62...
...But she made many friends and was able to return to the city in 1972...
...Thanks to its long postponed industrialization, essentially skipping the Industrial Revolution, the country was able to take advantage of new technology that permits low-cost production on a small scale...
...This encouraged everyone to work long hours...
...A decentralization of authority—the antithesis of socialism—was called "socialism with Chinese characteristics...
...Food lines disappeared as farmers sold their surplus in the cities...
...Unlike traditional state-owned enterprises, they don't survive if they can't meet debts from their own income...
...Accustomed as they were to making trouble and influencing people, they would beat the drums of protest—always on behalf of the people...
...So they would be content to live without politics...
...It's worth repeating that the countries of Western Europe were not democratic either when they advanced ahead of the rest of the world...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
