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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (22073)	3/24/2002 12:33:15 AM
From: LLLefty	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The next thing you'll be telling me is that China is just one big happy family with its "10 per cent a year growth for decades." I may have left China-watching years ago but I'll tell you how they still do it even today. Beijing sends out quotas and, lo and behold, the corrupt local party boss reports a boom year at his state factories and the county boss tells the provincial chief that all is dandy in his fifedom and provincial mandarin tells Beijing that he had a banner year. The Sinology fraternity reminds me of the late Kremlinologists who studied Politburo photos to see who was up and who was down even as the the USSR was spltting apart. They would have done better had they studied vodka sales or, as one specialist told me, read the Reader's Digest (Forgive me if I used this before; it's worth an encore). Meanwhile, lots of folks in the Chinese countryside and the cities are a bit put off at the party bosses and the bosses' children raking it in and flaunting their wealth. So some folks get mad enough to run a protest. Now it's not like a Kiwi demonstration where the gentle folk hold up signs demanding "Keep foreigners out." In China, protesting takes a bit of courage; it can have a severe effect upon one's health, even his lifespan. And if, it's occurring daily, as the press seems to report when it can spare a few inches from Afghanistan or the Middle East, everything can't be as hunky-dory as you seem to say. Of course, our stores are stuffed with cheap Chinese goods, as they were years ago with made-in-Japan. The comprador is not dead; he's running sweat shops for the foreign firms. But all is not bad; I would guess several hundred million Chinese are living better today than did their fathers. I I'm not so certain that some of the billion others in that 10 percent-year-growth country wouldn't mind giving up the Chinese paradise for a shot at living in New Zealand. They could get NZ's growth rate up to 10 per cent, really.