The Giant With Feet of Clay

Chinese Dragon

As China is emerging as a new economic world power, asserting this power on both economic and military fields by being able to face the crisis that is jolting the economies of many countries and even support those in need, and, on the other hand, by completing some serious military projects such as the building of aircraft carrier capacity, the question that stands is what is this great power built on?

That the Communist system proved right in China, after it failed in all the other parts of the world where it had been applied, one shouldn’t even accept this idea into debate. The mystery of China’s boom is hardly related to Communist ideology. It is rather the hard work and dedication of the Chinese that made their country what it is now.

In fact, if it weren’t for the reform introduced by Den Xiaoping, who opened the country to some sort of mixture society that combines Communist control and capitalist know how, China would be no more than a giant North Korea.

So, what is it that makes China a great economic power, and moreover, is China capable to sustain this growth? Is this growth backed by social reforms meant to ensure that at a certain point the entire country will not collapse?

Is the new generation of politicians open-minded enough as to make sure that the society is finding a normal way of life, that would correspond to the expectations of most of the people?

At a first glimpse, it would seem that China has enough problems to take care of, and if unsolved, they will bring down this colossal power.

China's Map with Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia

First off, there is a territorial problem. Although China has claimed and obtained former colonies from the Western powers, the most important of which, Hong Kong, was transferred to China in 1997 by the United Kingdom, while Macao came to China in 1999 from Portugal, there are problems within the great country that are not solved yet.

There is a very powerful movement in the Xinjiang province, also known unofficially as East Turkestan. There live a 45% majority of Uighur people, who demand at least autonomy from Beijing rule.

The Uighur protest the measure of China to settle Han population in the region in order to alter the ethnic balance. They complain that their being restricted the right to a religion, and to a culture of their own.

A few weeks ago seven people were killed and a brutal crackdown followed as a few Uighur planted a bomb in a restaurant and attacked the Han Chinese with knives.

Right next to Xinjiang, there is the famous Tibet, who has a government in exile and who demands also some sort of autonomy from Beijing, at least at cultural level.

Dalai Lama is known as one of the most illustrious personalities in the world, and his reception by the president of the United States caused the Chinese Prime Minister to threat that whoever looks for independence of Tibet would be crushed.

Up north China has what is called the Inner Mongolia, a province whose name speaks for itself. Though the Mongolians are not as brutal as the Uighurs or as well represented as the Tibetans, they still have cultural and religious ties with Mongolian republic, an emerging country that has renounced Communism sometime in the 1990s.

There is another country in the world that calls itself the Republic of China, the so called Taiwan, which broke away from the republic of the people instituted after the WWII. ROC was founded in 1911, when the monarchy was overthrown, and is now the only part of China where Communism has not been accepted.

Taiwan people pretend they are the real Chinese people, and the mainland China went to great lengths to keep Taiwan out of the American range, protesting against its plans to acquire arms with which to defend against possible mainland Chinese interventions.

At a glimpse then, China seems like a country with a diversity of ethnic groups, which manifest to different extent their desire for autonomy. If Xinjiang and Tibet were to acquire somehow independence, China would lose more than a quarter of its territory.

Guangzhou City

The lack of national homogeneity is motivated probably by the lack of trust installed as the Chinese rule came to these territories. Tibet for instance was conquered and many people had to suffer for their religious convictions. Tibet has been defiled of its religious stance in the Buddhist world, because comrade Mao considered religion no more than an “opium for the masses.” His “cultural revolution” gave the “masses” something stronger to get high on, and that must have left some scars that are not likely to be healed any time soon.

The national and territorial problem aside, China is a divided society at every level, many people being subjected to both Communist “lowest common denominator” and to the capitalist division of access to resources.

Chinese society comes from an unique experience orchestrated by Mao’s regime. For decades people had been living in communities where they everyday life was planned and controlled by the party. From food rations to the right to get married, and the “food for thought” everything was provided by the party. The Communist party. This way of live must have created a certain way of seeing things, a certain world view.

The same situation happened in East European countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Albania, or even Russian Federation. After 21 years, the people in those countries are still searching for an identity of their own, and some of them are still regreting the old ways, being nostalgic of a regime that at least provided them with some security, in exchange for their freedom.

It is likely that the Chinese society goes through the same process, with more than a billion and one hundred and fifty thousand mouths to feed, with a capitalist society that is a half-breed, and shows them some of the ugliest facets of free society: destitution, unemployment, the “newly rich,” the corruption, the abundance of products and the lack of money.

Shanghai

China has a very harsh set of rules on corruption, and most of the corrupted end up receiving a bullet through their heads. Still, as the numbers will grow, keeping up with enforcing the law will grow more problematic, especially if corruption reaches the highest levels of the party.

As metropoles like Shanghai or Hong Kong grow larger and larger there is a more and more acute divide between rural and urban China.

The division is being sustained through the hukou system, the system that issues resident cards.

China is on the verge of issuing electronic hukou for the entire population, consisting in a plastic card with a microchip in it that contains almost all data about the holder: work history, health history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, insurance status. There is a discussion about introducing reproduction history, credit history, train travel payments, purchases charged to the card.

With this system on, China will have the most sophisticated way of keeping track of the entire population, something that is not new in China, but is definitely opening the stage for all sorts of possible abuses and violations of rights.

Hukou is the one to decide many aspects of the life of Chinese people. When it was reintroduced, in 1958, it was like in internal passport, meant to prevent the people from migrating from one place to the other unchecked, especially from rural zones to the cities.

Now, if someone wants to go from a village to a city, they need a hukou on which the city’s name be recorded under the city of residence rubric. Without such thing, families could even be broken, if one of the members of such family is sent to work in some part of China, and the other members of the family cannot follow for lack of hukou. And cannot be easily be procured.

The government cannot eliminate hukou, because it would be difficult to control anti-governmental movements, not to mention the flood of rural people to the overcrowded cities.

Rural Community

Many of the people that work in the Chinese exploding economy are people that have a rural hukou, and live in sites like Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong or Guangzhou sometimes for decades as “temporary residents,” without a right to acquire a public housing, or education beyond elementary school, public medical insurance or governmental welfare payment. Mainly, they live inside their own country as if they were immigrants to the United States or Europe, with the difference that at a certain point the United States or Europe would process them and either give them citizenship or expel them. In China they stay like this for decades, and go home every time they need to have a issuance of the state: divorce paper, birth certificate, school exams.

What is the most interesting thing is that these hukou-discriminated people pay taxes just like the residents of the cities but have none of their rights.

Another reason why the Chinese economic boom should be received with caution is the fact that even though China develops in every field of endeavor, the population is making very little out of it.

Regular Chinese people make miserable salaries, somewhere around $200 per month with a prospect of growing to $400 per month for those who have more sophisticated jobs.

With such a salary, it is not hard to assess why the national economy of China is booming. But it is also hard to assess how long will the population put up with it.

Some part of the economic boom of Chinese economy is built on counterfeiting products and selling them on the international market for small prices. While the business may work and even collect a few extra money, quite big actually, if one takes into account that the world market is flooded with low quality products that have the stamp on them “Made in China,” the government in Beijing must be prepared to pay the price for this easy way to cheat poverty on both sides, the buyer’s and the saleman’s.

Chinese multi-millenial culture has surprised humanity with extraordinary achievements such as the gunpowder, the paper legal tender, the books, martial arts, deep philosophers, jade works and the famous carving of the rice grain. These speak of Chinese tenacity and capacity to grasp details and compress space and time.

Conversely, contemporary China places on the counterfeited products it sells to the world the label “sloppy work,” which, when compared to the wonders of the ancient China, should be deemed as at least disregard for national history, if not betrayal altogether.

Only a government so hungry for money that wouldn’t stop at almost nothing could condone this kind of policy, which will show devastating effects for China’s credibility in the long run.

China has also a long list of people who dissent and advocate a new way of life. The regime has brutally shut them up, most of the time even locked them up. That is indicative that no matter how smiley Chinese leaders may be when they travel West, some of the people in his country may have a different expression on their faces.

After China finishes colonizing Africa and prepares to take over from the United States the role of leader of the world, the authorities must be ready to face a direct encounter with the free society. Unless serious reformation, profound reformation, is not carried on, the encounter with the West may result in two possible outcomes: a vivid friction between Chinese society and the one in the Western countries or serious domestic demands for change in the country.

Logic dictates that this economic growth cannot be sustained for ever with a nation that is deeply divided at any level, from the territorial one to the most intimate family business. That is why China’s shine should be seen with a doubt in the back of the mind.