And, well, it could be worse...maybe...
I've been skimming through a book by Dambisa Moyo called *Winner Take All.* She's an international economist with great credentials--from Nigeria I think.
Her book sounds the alarm about China's systematic effort to garner commodities and basic resources for the sake of its own growth and prosperity. One would think that all countries do this to one degree or another. I'm sure the CIA (and other agencies) have in-depth studies about the issue. But according to Moyo no other country or group of countries is putting forth the kind of single-minded, long range effort that China is. Her concern is that China's ambitions will ultimately create resource strains throughout the world that will lead to horrendous conflicts of one kind or another over oil, land and water, etc.
But despite that message & most interestingly, it seems to me that her book is largely an *apology* for China's policies. China goes into host countries and by Western capitalist standards greatly overpays for resources, labor and access to resources. In Africa, for example, China makes a practice of hiring as much local labor as is feasible for a project. The net result is that while the U.S. has a net positive regard in some of the poorest places on earth, China is viewed with *much* more favor by a couple of orders of magnitude.
The thing is, even in ostensibly private enterprises, the hand of the Chinese government is deeply involved in coordinating economic outcomes in accordance with policies set by the government. The thing is, also, it works pretty well. In the space of a decade China has created a middle class of 300,000,000 people and cut the poverty rate from 80% to 16%. And as far as I know (and perhaps someone knows better), the Chinese Commies don't have the reputation of cooking the books the way the Soviets did in the FSU. Even where the Chinese state doesn't formally own major enterprises, the degree of regulatory control arguably amounts to de facto state ownership.
Based on a few news reports and Mankell Henning's novel, *The Man from Beijing,* my highly impressionistic & not particularly well-informed view is that the Chinese ruling elite is notably unstupid in that they are aware that the existence of the nouveaux riche and the growth of inequality and corruption are problems they have to deal with. Also, there seems to have been a sort of groping toward the rule of law. Human rights activists continue to live in peril of prison or worse, but they are there and active.
I believe the Chinese people fear their government, but it is also the case that the Chinese government is beginning to fear its people. Most Chinese identify themselves as belonging to a single race--the Han Chinese. If you look at the variety of physical types throughout the country, that becomes almost as absurd as the notion that the all the nominally white people in the U.S. somehow belong to an identifiable & unitary "white race." The Han Chinese are patriotic about being Han Chinese to the extent that it makes the government nervous. Han Chinese tend to believe they have a civilizing mission toward peoples like the Tibetans & that they are ingrates and rebels for seeking independence. I recall that the government sought to dampen down patriotic Han Chinese fervor in the wake of some clashes between Tibetans and Chinese.
I would like to believe that the Chinese will one day evolve into a genuine democracy with guarantees of human rights & without relinquishing the progressive features of their economic arrangements. Well, it would be nice.
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