An interesting look at China

| No Comments
By someone who has been on the inside since day zero. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
China's economic power needs the party
Many of China's sharpest thinkers, funnily enough, never really went to school. They were the students who waged urban warfare in the name of Chairman Mao and traveled to all corners of the countryside to learn about life from peasants.

Qin Hui, a Tsinghua University economic historian and one of the country's most important public intellectuals, was out of town when Mao changed his tone and the governor of the poor, southern province of Guangxi smashed his student-worker Red Guard faction in 1968.

Twenty of Qin's classmates were killed. The schoolboy Qin agreed to be "sent down" to the mountainous western corner of Guangxi to spend nine years studying real rural life. Each month he would trek 30 kilometres to the highway and hitch into town to borrow books on medicine, agricultural machinery and electricity supply. He taught himself to read English and ploughed through works of social theory and American criticisms of the Soviet Union.

In 1978, when Mao and his Cultural Revolution were dead, Qin returned to the city and accepted a graduate place in Lanzhou University studying peasant history. It was his first day of formal education since primary school.

These days he carries both the idealism that fed the Cultural Revolution and the cynicism of state power that was its aftermath. He believes in market forces, socialism and liberalism. In China this means he rejects the Left's calls for state control and the Right's tolerance of it - and is therefore always on the outer.
OK -- so I think that we have a decent set of bona-fides...
Until recently Qin had always studied global history to inform his understanding of China. Last year, as the outside world was becoming acquainted with China's financial power as well as its manufacturing might, he used his understanding of Chinese history to deliver a warning to the world.

In an as yet unpublished seminar paper delivered at Monash University, he began:
" 'Only socialism can save China', Mao Zedong used to say. After the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism, some said that 'only China can save socialism'. But this now seems more and more ironic. The decade and more since 1992 above all shows that only China can destroy socialism."

He went on to argue China's rampant state-dominated, welfare-lite capitalism could so undercut competitors that it could threaten the social democratic traditions that underpin the West - unless China could change itself in time. Qin argues China's phenomenal market success lies in stripping its peasants and workers of their rights to associate and bargain.
A bit more:
The popular Western view that China will soon collapse under the weight of its political and economic contradictions is fantasy, and becoming more unrealistic by the day. The bigger questions require the world to accept that China is already a powerful world force.
For reasons well-explained in the article. One more paragraph:
The world therefore needs to come to terms with the nature of Chinese capitalism - Qin calls it "autocratic capitalism" - and consider what institutions and systems it might find itself importing from China, along with the great wall of capital and plasma TVs.
Interesting and scary. We have shipped so much of our manufacturing over to China that the startup costs to resume here would bankrupt most industries. Not very well thought out -- chasing the immediate profit instead of long-term growth. And now, they are making eyes at Taiwan...

Leave a comment

October 2022

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          

Environment and Climate
AccuWeather
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Climate Depot
Ice Age Now
ICECAP
Jennifer Marohasy
Solar Cycle 24
Space Weather
Watts Up With That?


Science and Medicine
Junk Science
Life in the Fast Lane
Luboš Motl
Medgadget
Next Big Future
PhysOrg.com


Geek Stuff
Ars Technica
Boing Boing
Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
FAIL Blog
Hack a Day
Kevin Kelly - Cool Tools
Neatorama
Slashdot: News for nerds
The Register
The Daily WTF


Comics
Achewood
The Argyle Sweater
Chip Bok
Broadside Cartoons
Day by Day
Dilbert
Medium Large
Michael Ramirez
Prickly City
Tundra
User Friendly
Vexarr
What The Duck
Wondermark
xkcd


NO WAI! WTF?¿?¿
Awkward Family Photos
Cake Wrecks
Not Always Right
Sober in a Nightclub
You Drive What?


Business and Economics
The Austrian Economists
Carpe Diem
Coyote Blog


Photography and Art
Digital Photography Review
DIYPhotography
James Gurney
Joe McNally's Blog
PetaPixel
photo.net
Shorpy
Strobist
The Online Photographer


Blogrolling
A Western Heart
AMCGLTD.COM
American Digest
The AnarchAngel
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Babalu Blog
Belmont Club
Bayou Renaissance Man
Classical Values
Cobb
Cold Fury
David Limbaugh
Defense Technology
Doug Ross @ Journal
Grouchy Old Cripple
Instapundit
iowahawk
Irons in the Fire
James Lileks
Lowering the Bar
Maggie's Farm
Marginal Revolution
Michael J. Totten
Mostly Cajun
Neanderpundit
neo-neocon
Power Line
ProfessorBainbridge.com
Questions and Observations
Rachel Lucas
Roger L. Simon
Samizdata.net
Sense of Events
Sound Politics
The Strata-Sphere
The Smallest Minority
The Volokh Conspiracy
Tim Blair
Velociworld
Weasel Zippers
WILLisms.com
Wizbang


Gone but not Forgotten...
A Coyote at the Dog Show
Bad Eagle
Steven DenBeste
democrats give conservatives indigestion
Allah
BigPictureSmallOffice
Cox and Forkum
The Diplomad
Priorities & Frivolities
Gut Rumbles
Mean Mr. Mustard 2.0
MegaPundit
Masamune
Neptunus Lex
Other Side of Kim
Publicola
Ramblings' Journal
Sgt. Stryker
shining full plate and a good broadsword
A Physicist's Perspective
The Daily Demarche
Wayne's Online Newsletter

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on January 9, 2008 7:15 PM.

Nice Guys - Network Solutions was the previous entry in this blog.

A bit of history is up for sale in NY State is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Monthly Archives

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Powered by Movable Type 5.2.9