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January 24, 2010
We don't really know much about China if we read the mainstream press in Australia. Their discourse is usually one of China's rapid rise to economic supremacy and aren't we oh so lucky that the Chinese need our minerals for their superfast economic growth. Shanghai is the showcase of Chinese ‘hyper-modernity’. If in the 19th century, Australia, like Europe, looked to America as the future, then In the 21st century, the West looks towards China in something of the same way.
Buried within this celebratory discourse, which is spun by the mining companies and the Australian state, is a subcurrent of fear that a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect for the state, will end the dominance of the West.This usually surfaces when state owned Chinese companies what to buy into the mining companies.
We don't get much of an account of the models of developed that have enable this economic growth. What strategies have been employed by the Chinese state to ensure this economic development and high-speed growth? It cannot just be the dynamism of capitalism since free markets in China remain half-strangled and deformed by a corrupt and self-aggrandising state, which denies its people liberty to manage their own economic affairs.
This book review by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books helps to fill in some of the gaps. It reminds us that the great state-owned enterprises of the north-east were scrapped or sold off, leaving their workers jobless and often near-penniless while officials and profiteers lined their pockets. So we have the rustbelt of Manchuria. It also highlights that the state in the 1990s poured loan capital into large, rebuilt state-owned enterprises and urban infrastructures and granting massive advantages to foreign capital drawn to the big cities.
Anderson says that the sunbelt of Guangdong:
has seen the emergence of a new working class of young migrant labourers from the countryside, about half of them women, without collective identity or political memory, in the coastal export zones of the south-east. They have low-wage jobs, but no security, toiling up to 70 or 80 hours a week in often atrocious working conditions, with widespread exposure to abuse and injury. Dereliction in the rustbelt, super-exploitation in the sunbelt: the treatment of labour is pitiless in either zone.
The social consequences of this change has been massive inequality between and city-dwellers within the urban population itself.
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Yes, the Chinese will no doubt have to endure the same massive social upheavals as other countries had to in the transition to an industrialised economy. Those who enjoy the benefits will say it's all worth it and those who pay the price ... well who cares what they think? They have no more say in the matter than did the British and Irish folk forced from their traditional lifestyles to work in factories in the 18th and 19th centuries.
At least the Chinese industrial revolution seems to be marked by a modest social conscience on the part of government ... at least compared to 18/19th century England and USA.