Re: Horrible extract from upcoming horrible book

[Daniel Frederick Vukovich <vukovich@hkucc.hku.hk>]

Thanks, Saul.  This is a good one for class. And happy non-falsifiable Western
Enlightenment values and institutions New Years to all! 

best, Dan

-- 
Daniel F. Vukovich
Assistant Professor
Comparative Literature, School of Humanities
208 Main Bldg.
The University of Hong Kong
(852) 2859 7934


Quoting Saul Thomas <stthomas@nerdshack.com>:

> This is a horrible article from Sunday's Observer. I forward it because 
> some of you who are teachers might want to treat it as a specimen for 
> analysis and discussion (I am thinking of Dan Vukovich in particular).
> 
> Saul
> -------------
> 
> http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1984044,00.html?=rss
> 
> New China. New crisis
> 
> 
> In the last decade China has emerged as a powerful, resurgent economic 
> force with the muscle to challenge America as the global superpower. 
> But, in his controversial new book, Will Hutton argues that China's 
> explosive economic reforms will create seismic tensions within the 
> one-party authoritarian state and asks: can the centre hold?
> 
> Sunday January 7, 2007
> The Observer
> 
> For more than 2,000 years, China's conceit was that it was the celestial 
> kingdom, the country whose standing was endowed by heaven itself and 
> whose emperors tried to reproduce heavenly harmony on Earth. All China 
> basked in the reflected glow; foreigners were barbarians beyond the 
> gilded pale who should not be allowed even to learn the art of speaking 
> and writing Chinese.
> 
> When I first visited China in the autumn of 2003, such articles of 
> Confucian faith seemed very far away, submerged by the lost wars and the 
> 26 humiliating treaties of the 19th century, subsequent communist 
> revolution and now the economic growth to which Beijing's motorway rings 
> and Shanghai's skyline are tribute. This was a new China that had 
> plainly left behind obeisance to the canons of Confucianism and the 
> later cruelties of Mao. More than three years and a book later, I am 
> less convinced.
> 
> Article continues
> All societies are linked to their past by umbilical cords - some 
> apparent, some hidden. China is no different. Imperial Confucian China 
> and communist China alike depended - and depend - upon the notion of a 
> vastly powerful, infallible centre: either because it was interpreting 
> the will of heaven or, now, of the proletariat. In neither system have 
> human rights, constitutional checks and balances or even forms of 
> democracy figured very much. As a result, China has poor foundations on 
> which to build the subtle network of institutions of accountability 
> necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. 
> Sooner or later, it is a failing that will have to be addressed.
> 
> China is both very confident about its recent success and very insecure 
> about its past, a potent mix that breeds a deep-seated xenophobia and 
> shallow arrogance. China's economy in 2007 will be nearly nine times 
> larger than it was in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping won the power struggle 
> with the Maoists and began his extraordinarily sinuous, gradualist but 
> successful programme of market-based economic reforms, groping for 
> stones to cross the river, as he called it. China is now the fourth 
> largest economy in the world - after the United States, Japan, and 
> Germany - and is set to become the second largest within a decade. More 
> than 150 million workers have moved to China's booming cities and 400 
> million people have been removed from poverty. It is a head-spinning 
> achievement.
> 
> China is the new factor in global politics and economics, and its rulers 
> and people know it. It now has more than $1 trillion of foreign exchange 
> reserves, the world's largest. It is the single most important financier 
> of the United States' enormous trade deficit. It is the world's second 
> largest importer of oil. Before 2010, it will be the world's largest 
> exporter of goods. It is, comfortably, the world's second largest 
> military power. Last year, the Pentagon's four-yearly defence review 
> stated that China is the power most likely to 'field disruptive military 
> technologies that could over time offset traditional US military 
> advantages'. A new great power is in the making, but one whose pursuit 
> of its self-interest takes the amorality of power to a new plane. It is 
> not just the Chinese who should be concerned about its institutional and 
> moral failings; all of us should be.
> 
> In China, you can almost smell the new self-confidence: it is in the 
> skyscrapers built in months; it is in the brash and unashamed 
> willingness to rip off and copy Western brands; it is in the 
> well-groomed and inscrutable demeanour of the rich entrepreneurs, 
> self-confident officials and assured academics.
> 
> I sat in a Beijing bar just over a year ago with a typical member of 
> China's new class of rich businessmen who double up as members of the 
> party, a combination of commercial and political power that China knew 
> well as the old Confucian mandarinate, now strangely reproducing itself 
> in a new guise after Mao tried to eliminate it forever in the Cultural 
> Revolution.
> 
> In surprisingly fluent English and with his Mercedes waiting outside, he 
> praised China's communist regime and its curious mix of capitalism and 
> communism with all the enthusiasm of a Tory businessmen praising 
> Thatcher. Chinese corruption? Think of Enron and party-funding scandals 
> in London, he declaimed. Double standards between communist rhetoric and 
> practice? What about the US and Britain's invasion of Iraq, and 
> Guantanamo Bay? What I failed to realise, he insisted, betraying both 
> assurance and insecurity, is that China will not surrender again the 
> natural rank that it should never have lost. Western values, 
> institutions and attitudes were being revealed for being straw men, 
> blown away by resurgent China and the pragmatism of its communist leaders.
> 
> Yet Western values and institutions are not being blown away. The 
> country has made progress to the extent that communism has given up 
> ground and moved towards Western practices, but there are limits to how 
> far the reformers can go without giving up the basis for the party's 
> political control. Conservatives insist that much further and the 
> capacity to control the country will become irretrievably damaged; that 
> the limit, for example, is being reached in giving both trade unions 
> more autonomy and shareholders more rights. It is the most urgent 
> political debate in China.
> 
> The tension between reform and conservatism is all around. For example, 
> the party's commitment now is no longer to building a planned communist 
> economy but a 'socialist market' economy. The 26,000 communes in rural 
> China, which were once the vanguard of communism, were swept away by the 
> peasants themselves in just three years between 1979 and 1982, the 
> largest bottom-up act of decollectivisation the world has ever 
> witnessed. Hundreds of millions of peasants are, via long leases, again 
> farming plots held by their ancestors for millenniums. China's 
> state-owned enterprises no longer provide life-long employment and 
> welfare for their workers as centrepieces of a new communist order; they 
> are autonomous companies largely free to set prices as they choose in an 
> open economy and progressively shedding their social obligations.
> 
> Equally amazing, China's communists have declared that the class war is 
> over. The party now claims to represent not just the worker and peasant 
> masses but entrepreneurs and business leaders, whom it welcomes into its 
> ranks. The party refers to this metamorphosis as the 'three represents': 
> meaning that the party today represents 'advanced productive forces' 
> (capitalists); 'the overwhelming majority' of the Chinese (not just 
> workers and peasants); and 'the orientation ... of China's advanced 
> culture' (religious, political and philosophical traditions other than 
> communism).
> 
> Party representatives say that the country is no longer pledged to fight 
> capitalism to the death internationally, but, instead, wants to rise 
> peacefully. China has joined the World Trade Organisation and is a 
> judicious member of the United Nations Security Council, using its veto 
> largely in matters that immediately concern it, such as Taiwan.
> 
> But for all that, it remains communist. The maxims of 
> Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought have to stand, however much the party 
> tries to stretch the boundaries, because they are the basis for 
> one-party rule. Yet the system so spawned is reaching its limits. For 
> example, China's state-owned and directed banks cannot carry on 
> channelling hundreds of billions of pounds of peasant savings into the 
> financing of a frenzy of infrastructure and heavy industrial investment. 
> The borrowers habitually pay interest only fitfully, and rarely repay 
> the debt, even as the debt mountain explodes. The financial system is 
> vulnerable to any economic setback.
> 
> Equally, China is reaching the limits of the capacity to increase its 
> exports, which, in 2007, will surpass $1 trillion, by 25 per cent a 
> year. At this rate of growth, they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or 
> sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that 
> likely? Are there ships and ports on sufficient scale to move such 
> volumes - and will Western markets stay uncomplainingly open? Every 
> year, it is also acquiring $200bn of foreign exchange reserves as it 
> rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. Can even China 
> insulate its domestic financial system from such fantastic growth in its 
> reserves and stop inflation rising? Already, there are ominous signs 
> that inflationary pressures are increasing.
> 
> These ills have communist roots. It is the lack of independent scrutiny 
> and accountability that lie behind the massive waste of investment and 
> China's destruction of its environment alike. The pace of 
> desertification has doubled over 20 years, in a country where 25 per 
> cent of the land area is already desert. Air pollution kills 400,000 
> people a year prematurely. A hacking cough in the Beijing smog or the 
> stench when the wind comes from the north in Shanghai are reminders of 
> just how far China still has to go.
> 
> Energy is wasted on an epic scale. But the worst problem is water. 
> One-fifth of China's 660 cities face extreme water shortages and as many 
> as 90 per cent have problems of water pollution; 500 million rural 
> Chinese still do not have access to safe drinking water. Illegal and 
> rampant polluting, a severe shortage of sewage treatment facilities, and 
> chemical pollutants together continue to degrade China's waterways. In 
> autumn 2005, two major cities - Harbin and Guangzhou - had their water 
> supplies cut off for days because their river sources had suffered acute 
> chemical spills from state-owned factories.
> 
> Enterprises are accountable to no one but the Communist party for their 
> actions; there is no network of civil society, plural public 
> institutions and independent media to create pressure for enterprises to 
> become more environmentally efficient. Watchdogs, whistleblowers, 
> independent judges and accountable government are not just good in 
> themselves as custodians of justice; they also keep capitalism honest 
> and efficient and would curb environmental costs that reach an amazing 
> 12 per cent of GDP. As importantly, they are part of the institutional 
> network that constitutes an independent public realm that includes free 
> intellectual inquiry, free trade unions and independent audit. It is 
> this 'enlightenment infrastructure' that I regard in both the West and 
> East as the essential underpinning of a healthy society. The individual 
> detained for years without a fair trial is part of the same malign 
> system that prevents a company from expecting to be able to correct a 
> commercial wrong in a court, or have a judgment in its favour 
> implemented, if it were against the party interest.
> 
> The impact is pernicious. The reason why so few Britons can name a great 
> Chinese brand or company, despite China's export success, is that there 
> aren't any. China needs to build them, but doing that in a one-party 
> authoritarian state, where the party second-guesses business strategy 
> for ideological and political ends, is impossible. In any case, nearly 
> three-fifths of its exports and nearly all its hi-tech exports are made 
> by non-Chinese, foreign firms, another expression of China's weakness. 
> The state still owns the lion's share of China's business and what it 
> does not own, it reserves the right to direct politically.
> 
> Mark Kitto, a former Welsh Guardsman, has found at first-hand how 
> difficult it is to sustain private ownership in China. He built up three 
> Time Out equivalents in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou but, after seven 
> years of successful magazine publishing, learnt last year that he was 
> about to become a partner of the state. The only terms on which his 
> licence to publish could be retained was if he were to accept a de facto 
> takeover from China Intercontinental Press, controlled by China's State 
> Information Council, the propaganda mouthpiece of the Communist party. 
> It did not matter that he owned the shares, wanted to retain his 
> independence and had been careful to stay within the party's publishing 
> guidelines. The party now wanted control of his magazines and simply 
> took it. It is an example repeated many times over.
> 
> China must become a more normal economy, but the party stands in the 
> way. Chinese consumers need to save less and spend more, but consumers 
> with no property rights or welfare system are highly cautious. To give 
> them more confidence means taxing to fund a welfare system and conceding 
> property rights. That will mean creating an empowered middle class who 
> will ask how their tax renminbi are spent. Companies need to be subject 
> to independent accountability if they are to become more efficient, but 
> that means creating independent centres of power. The political 
> implications are obvious.
> 
> China's future is shrouded in uncertainty. My belief is that what is 
> unsustainable is not sustained. Change came in the Soviet Union with the 
> fifth generation of leaders after the revolution; the fifth generation 
> of China's leaders succeed today's President Hu Jintao in 2012. No 
> political change will happen until after then, but my guess is that 
> sometime in the mid to late 2010s, the growing Chinese middle class will 
> want to hold Chinese officials and politicians to account for how they 
> spend their taxes and for their political choices. What nobody can 
> predict is whether that will produce another Tiananmen, repression and 
> maybe war if China's communists pick a fight to sustain legitimacy at 
> home or an Eastern European velvet revolution and political freedoms. 
> Either way, China's route to becoming a world economic power is not 
> going to proceed as a simple extrapolation of current trends.
> 
> This book has been something of a personal intellectual odyssey. My 
> hypothesis when I began was that China was so different that it could 
> carry on adapting its model, living without democracy or European 
> enlightenment values. I have changed my mind and now see more clearly 
> than ever the kinds of connection I identified in The State We're In 
> between economic performance and so-called 'soft' institutions - how 
> people are educated, how trust relations are established and how 
> accountability is exercised (just to name a few) - are central. They are 
> equally important to a good society and the chance for individual 
> empowerment and self-betterment.
> 
> Early in my research, I tried out the still-emergent thesis at a small 
> dinner in Lan Na Thai, one of the restaurants in Shanghai's Ruijin guest 
> house, a complex of refurbished old mansions and traditional pavilions 
> in the French quarter where communist leaders reputedly once ate and slept.
> 
> Over stir-fried curried chicken and crispy fried flying sea bass, the 
> Chinese guests repeated politely and persuasively that China was making 
> up new economic and political rules. Afterwards, I chanced to have a few 
> words alone with one of the local rising government stars as we walked 
> out of the complex. He kept his eyes on the ground. 'Don't allow 
> yourself to be dissuaded, despite what you have heard. You are right 
> that China is not different. I want my children to see a China with 
> human rights and democratic institutions. And I am not alone.' He jumped 
> into a taxi and was gone.
> 
> I have often thought about that chance exchange. Britain and the West 
> take our enlightenment inheritance too easily for granted, and do not 
> see how central it is to everything we are, whether technological 
> advance, trust or well-being. We neither cherish it sufficiently nor 
> live by its exacting standards. We share too quickly the criticism of 
> non-Western societies that we are hypocrites. What China has taught me, 
> paradoxically, is the value of the West, and how crucial it is that we 
> practise what we preach. If we don't, the writing is on the wall - for 
> us and China.
> 
> China's quest for oil
> 
> China's foreign policy is increasingly driven by the need to feed its 
> growing appetite for oil. General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of the 
> Chinese general staff, has said that China's energy problem needs to be 
> taken 'seriously and dealt with strategically'.
> 
> That means less reliance on the Middle East; less transportation of oil 
> via sea-lanes policed by the US navy; more capacity for the Chinese navy 
> to protect Chinese tankers; and more oil brought overland by pipeline 
> from central Asia.
> 
> Over the past two years, China has pulled off a string of strategic oil 
> deals. In April 2005, Petro China and Canadian company Enbridge signed a 
> memorandum to build a $2bn 'gateway' pipeline to move oil from Alberta 
> to the Pacific Coast. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is to build a 
> Chinese-financed pipeline to the Pacific coast through Colombia, having 
> given China oil and gas exploration rights in 2005. Saudi Arabia 
> surrendered to Chinese courtship in 2004 and accorded exploration rights.
> 
> In Sudan, a major source of oil, China's blind eye to human rights and 
> mass murder if it hinders its interests is demonstrated by Zhou 
> Wenzhong's comment when Deputy Foreign Minister about the situation in 
> Darfur where more than 250,000 have died.'Business is business,' he 
> said. 'We try to separate politics from business and, in any case, the 
> internal position of Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a 
> position to influence them.'
> 
> Wrong: China has substantial influence on Sudan if it chose to exercise 
> it. It does not, a commentary on China's approach to foreign policy and 
> an awesome warning of the future if an unreconstructed China became yet 
> more powerful.
> 
> Tiananmen: the legacy
> 
> The image of a single student halting a tank in Tiananmen Square is one 
> of the most arresting in modern history. But the protests spread well 
> beyond Beijing for six weeks in spring 1989 to encompass demonstrations 
> in 181 cities.
> 
> The party and army were divided over how to respond; 150 officers openly 
> declared that they would not fire on demonstrators after martial law was 
> declared, and at least a third of the central committee wanted to reach 
> a compromise with the protesters. The party's then general secretary, 
> Zhao Ziyang, proposed a partial meeting of demands for reform. Nobody 
> should be killed.
> 
> That was not the view of Deng and the party elders - the eight 
> 'immortals', veterans of the Revolution. A 'counter-revolutionary' riot 
> had to be suppressed. But before Deng could act, he had to leave Beijing 
> to ensure that army groups 28 and 29, personally loyal to him, would 
> provide the core of the force rather than the uncertain army groups 
> based around the capital. Once in place, Zhao was then brutally deposed, 
> remaining under house arrest until his death in 2005. Martial law was 
> imposed on 19 May and a fortnight later the tanks rolled into Tiananmen 
> Square. Official estimates were that 5,000 soldiers and police officers 
> were wounded and 223 killed. Civilian losses - 2,000 wounded and 220 
> killed - were lower. Many still languish in prison.
> 
> Tiananmen is the event that cannot be discussed in China; websites 
> mentioning it are blocked. It was no 'counter-revolutionary riot' but a 
> demand for freedoms that infected all China and very nearly succeeded.
> 
> Current leader Hu Jintao and his successors know they are not Deng and 
> cannot command the loyalty of key elements of the army in the same way. 
> Their best strategy is to deliver growth and jobs while trying to keep 
> the lid on China's growing but still disconnected social protests. 
> Whether the policy will carry on working is the open question asked 
> daily in Beijing's inner circles.
> 
> · An edited extract from The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in 
> the 21st Century to be published by Little, Brown on 15 January, £20.
> 
> ©Will Hutton 2007
>