Zhang Weiwei had an article on The Huffington Post titled; “China’s Success Due To Rejecting Both Market And Democracy Fundamentalism” where he makes the case that China has discovered the modern secret of how to rise, while the West, that would be you and me, declines. Mister Zhang makes his point best in this paragraph:
In the past few decades, China, on the other hand, has adopted the “socialist market economy” in which the government’s “visible hand” and the market’s “invisible hand” are combined. While this model is far from perfect and needs further fine-tuning, it seems to bring together the best of two possible worlds and has achieved stunning results for China.
Jiddu Krishnamurti?once said, “If we can really understand the question, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the question.” Many of Krishnamurti’s books had examples of him being asked a question and then, rather than answering the question, would first examine the question itself. Let’s do that with Mister Zhang’s comments. We are asked to believe that China has, in a vacuum, created a system that combines the best of Keynesian, visible hand, policies with either Adam Smith’s, invisible hand of God, or Milton Friedman’s invisible hand of greed. This leads to his asserting that this, and this alone, has produced, “stunning results for China.” ?Notice how by simply examining the “question” the statement falls apart?
But China’s rise, and our demise, is what everyone seems to be talking about. Mark Weisbrot, a respected economist and frequent critic of the World Bank, opponent of social security privatization here in the US, and is considered a center to center-left economist also had an article on Huffington Post about this issue. ?In his piece, “China as the Worlds Largest Economy: What Does It Mean?” ?Dr. Weisbrot does a good job of explaining that the Chinese economy is already bigger than our own.
First, the technicalities: the comparison is made on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, which means that it takes into account the differing prices in the two countries. So, if a dollar is worth 6.3 renminbi today on the foreign exchange market, it may be that 6.3 renminbi can buy a lot more in China than one dollar can buy in the U.S. The PPP comparison adjusts for that; that is why China’s economy is much bigger than the measure that you have most commonly seen in the media, which simply converts China’s GDP to dollars at the official exchange rate.
Basically he is saying that the way of deciding the issue is to take one dollar and see what it buys in both countries. Doing that we realize pretty quickly that China’s economy probably is and has been larger than ours for a couple of years. Rather than discussing how that came to be and why Dr. Weisbrot shifts the focus to our bloated military budget, which we all know is bankrupting our country and, thanks to the NSA and the legion of nameless security agencies our tax dollars are supporting, is largely responsible for much of our bad foreign and economic policy. That gets mentioned and then dismissed. The article concludes with this;
Whatever the internal political systems of the countries whose representation in the international arena will increase, the end result is likely to be more democratic governance at the international level, with a greater rule of international law, fewer wars, and more social and economic progress.
Which seems to be a version of the same magical thinking Zhang showed in his article. That by some unknown force the countries that currently are getting rich off of the broken system will somehow create “more democratic governance”? That there will be an enforcement of “international law” and more “social and economic” progress? Dr. Weisbrot is an intelligent person but how will China, a country built upon slave labor and exploiting/violating trade treaties, ignoring intellectual property, etc. How will China agree to more democracy when they do not believe that democracy works? The only time they will agree to international law is when they own the majority of patents rather than some other country/company. And China’s “social and economic progress” has come at a very high international price. A price that may be too high.
Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs criminal, and also an economist had a piece on China in The Guardian. The point of his article is:
If these new estimates become accepted wisdom, then a few things become much more immediate for the running of our world economy and society. First, China’s position and weight within all forms of international governance ? ranging from the G20 to the IMF, World Bank and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and all the way to the United Nations ? must become bigger quicker than previously believed. This has to be accepted by China itself, which might be at the heart of its initial reluctance ? it might not feel it is prepared.
Mr. O’Neill obviously does not use the Krishnamurti method of looking at how or why a question came to be. There is only the economic finality that China has ascended and cannot be contained nor should they be. At least he seems to grasp that rather than embracing “democracy” that China should instead start taking a “governance” role in just about everything.
Let’s visit one more statement from J. Krishnamurti. He said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society.” We have three influential, well educated, world respected men, “well adjusted” successful men explaining to us in various ways that the majority middle class style economies built after World War 2 are no longer valid. That the new economic model is going to be, and that it should be, a small but larger than historical norm rich class, a smaller than we have come to expect middle class, and then a version of economic Hunger Games for the rest of us.
Let us consider for a moment that China did not achieve this success in a vacuum. For example it is a low estimate that at least 2.9 million people are slaves in China. That isn’t counting the number of people not counted as slaves who live in poverty, those who work at poverty wages, and those who have their wages stolen from them by having to pay someone for the job they have. China built its wealth so quickly in two ways. Firstly they used the same diseased mechanism that we in the West used: slavery. Stealing labor is the easiest way to acquire and build wealth. Unfortunately it usually leads to societal collapse as the Romans, and as we here in the US, could attest to. But while it’s working the profits are dizzying and intoxicating. Secondly, even if China has been enslaving its own people that would be meaningless if the Western countries valued the labor of their citizens and banned products made that did not meet their own labor, environmental, or safety standards. ?Since 1947 every international trade treaty has focused on lowering tariffs, opening markets, and lowering the taxes owed by large corporations. None of those treaties did anything to protect our environment, or the costs to the environment that those treaties cause, do not protect established labor markets from surplus labor markets, thereby destroying the very class of consumers who are supposed to buy the goods being produced and shipped freely, they do nothing to enforce the rules that were put, with a wink and nudge, in place to prevent currency manipulation or using cheap labor.
In short we are being asked to accept that the Chinese system is better than our system simply because China successfully created a “middle class” of ten percent of its population while leaving the majority of its population as “cheap labor.” The “miracle” is based on giving three to five hundred million people a middle class lifestyle while dehumanizing and exploiting the remaining one billion! The advancement of China has only been possible because the Western economies, whose wealth is also built on slave labor, a system that has slavery in it’s collective unconscious, seems determined to build a new type of corporate feudalism. If you live in Korea you will be the property of Samsung. In America you may have several “owners” all of whom extract value from you while providing you nothing in return for you to build wealth with. Apple sells you a phone made by slaves and keeps their profits offshore so they don’t pay taxes. Gap uses sweatshops and Nike child labor to produce their goods abroad none of which creates real economic opportunity for you. They all have as their main goal to extract more wealth out of the United States than they produce. This is no “economic miracle.” Instead it is the end of what was, for a very short time, and for very few people, a majority middle class America.
China is rising. History tells us that the means they are using to rise means oppression, violence, censorship, and propaganda are inevitably the tools they will use on their people and that our government will use on us to delay a demand for real change. History also tells us they will eventually fail. China is rising and we are descending. Let us take this opportunity to decide what kind of country, what kind of world, we want.
Edited/Published: SB
