China's shock and awe
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The enigma of present day China is stimulating considerable interest in the mass media, academia and global public opinion. China is increasingly receiving positive press for its ability to implement policies which produce recession-beating economic growth. Reporters for the BBC World Service describe with obvious envy the speed of implementation of development and infrastructure projects. Green technology is also a field where there is an increasing belief that China really means business and will deliver in a way that capitalist market economies cannot. The ability of the Chinese state through government, banks and public enterprises to focus energy, mobilize resources and enact successful policies during the deepest recession since the 1930s, poses profound questions about the relevance of the "Beijing consensus" to other regions of the world.
China is certainly testing the standard categories of politics and economics. In the 1980s and 1990s the theory of trickle-down economics held that the rich few in the Western World, through the pursuit of their own self-interested enrichment, would generate a steady flow of capital to the poorest. The rich would enrich society. Model entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Bill Gates, swam in the same seas as socially concerned celebrities like Sir Bob Geldorf and Bono on a mission to rid humanity of the scourge of starvation, death by curable diseases and eradicable poverty. Billions of people were moved to participate in grand global initiatives combining the hopes of the new millennium with the emotional dreams woven by pop songs for change.
Then came the great reversal. The world teetered on the edge of financial meltdown. In the richest countries the salvation of the banks by the state resulted in consequent savage cuts in social spending aimed at sharply reducing the living standards of the working classes in Europe and America. An epoch of rising living standards and relative social peace was social turned on its head. Even now, the speed of the transformation in the socio-economic environment feels like a bomb that hit out of the blue. It seems each cutback causes new shocks. In these circumstances, events in China take on a significance way beyond what people in China may realize.
It is widely reported that a new class of the super-rich are thriving in China. The emergence of a growing troupe of billionaires in China naturally horrifies many progressive minded people around the world. They fear that China is simply emulating the pattern of enrichment of the few and disregard for the many that characterized the neo-liberal capitalist model that conquered most of the rest of the world for two decades. The fostering of harmonious social relations and social stability is bound to be tested by the existence of such grotesque inequalities.
China’s recent labor unrest likewise produced jaw dropping reactions in the West. On the one hand, through the discovery that factories the size of Foxconn exist at all; on the other hand, that the workers’ cause was positively reported in the Chinese press. The speed and intensity of the birth of the new proletariat from the migrant peasantry would make Karl Marx wake up and cry, "I told you so!" Now, one in four proletarians in the world work in China.
Then there are the figures for Trade Union (212 million) and Communist Party (78 million) membership that astound those who discover this. More union members than in the whole of the rest of the world! A bigger Communist Party than the combined membership of all the rest of the world's Communist, Social Democratic and Labor Parties at their peak! Of course the workers' voice in a union the size of the adult population of the USA needs to find adequate channels of expression.
Few in the West are familiar with the fact that according to the Constitution of the PRC the Chinese "working class is the ruling class", and that workers' legal rights are actually greater than in any capitalist country. For example, under the Enterprise Law, workers in state enterprises through their workers’ congress have the right to elect their managers and decide or veto all important issues affecting them. Unfortunately, even though workers have good legal rights, most people agree that workers' wages are too low, while the rich become ever richer. Enforcing workers' legal rights has obviously become an burning issue in China; nevertheless the same legal rights would be welcomed by union members around the world.
Recently the acclaimed Sinologist Dr. Peter Nolan held two lectures on "Marxism and China" in London and Cambridge. He unraveled some of these contradictory processes and revealed how China has thrown down a major practical challenge to theories of development and human progress. Karl Marx could not have foreseen the long and tortuous pathway that China has had to take to modernize and advance. Nolan argued that the progress of global production chains, of giant facilities and the creation of the Chinese working class, would certainly have been considered by Marx as confirmation of his theories and would not have surprised him.
China seems to have harnessed capitalist impulses and been able to muster significant resources generated by capitalism to serve state intervention and to direct resources towards social and developmental ends, an objective Lenin's 'New Economic Policy' was only partially able to achieve. In the later USSR, state planning was characterized by the complete dominance of a monotone and bureaucratic dead-hand.
Some analysts blame rising inequality and worker and peasant unrest on the continued extensive role of the state bureaucracy and the opportunities this provides to enrich a corrupt few. Everyone knows there are corrupt officials, unions who don't defend workers' rights, and party members whose communism is tainted. However, often observers foolishly lump together the entire party, unions, and bureaucracy. This is like blaming all Americans for the war in Iraq. When the Chinese Communist Party says it stands for "socialism" with "public ownership at the core", seeks a "harmonious society", the "reduction of inequality", and the defense of the "rights of the workers and peasants" "according to the law", I do not doubt the motivations and determination that this represents. I am sure this represents the aims and aspirations of the majority of union members and party members in China. In the same way certain freedoms and democratic core values are held by wide layers of the people in Britain, Europe and the United States.
In the present soul-searching by progressive forces internationally, all of China's problems and successes over recent years and decades should be studied seriously on their own merits with a view to crafting new models of socialism by learning from practical successes and failures. Burning global issues mean that action to consciously bring together the working peoples of the rest of the world with the working peoples of China can help us to collaboratively shape a better future for all.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/node_7084903.htm
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