FOCUS ON... CHINA
Just before he left his position as Chairman of the Board of Trade
Mr Heseltine paid China a visit to help boost our interests. Mr
Heseltine - unlike Mr Blair - has never been a fanatical supporter
of Thatcherite entrepreneurial idealism, he believes instead that it
is the role of the state to help promote 'national interests'. What
this means of course, translated into understandable English, is
that it is the role of the state to use its resources to promote
corporate interest and to help win big contracts for the boys and
thus boost their profits. It is all seen as an economic equation with
little thought of the implications of dealing with a regime that
outshines most for its repression and violence.
But China is a paradox that the west doesn't seem to understand. The
yin and yan of the big/small, rich/poor, urban/rural are well out of
harmony in the Chinese empire. The concentration of attention on the
Eastern seabord puts out of focus the wider picture which - moral
questions aside - gives a bleaker message to those who are wetting
themselves over the biggest consumer market in the world.
The vision is still much the same as it was in the 19th century when it
was argued that if only the Chinese could be persuaded to legthen
their shirttails by a foot the mills of Lancashire would work around
the clock. The dream turns sour somewhat when we take stock of a
World Bank study that estimated that in the mid 1980s the average
Chinese citizen had a budget for consumer spending of around =A31 a
week. Optimistic plans to increase this eightfold by the year 2000
would, if achieved get them to the levels recorded in Nicaragua some
10 years ago. Inflation will of course take its toll on all of this which
was running at just over 24% last year and it's still rising in rural
areas. The World Bank emphasised all this when its managing director
Ernest Stern, reported in The Guardian (13/5/95) that China's much
trumpeted economic growth had taken place against a background of
'severe imbalances among regions and income groups, rapid changes
in relative welfare among people and regions, increasing
environmental destruction, and periodic high inflation.' The report
continues that, 'Up to 100mn have missed out and are 'desperately
poor'. Improved living standards has slowed down since mid-80s.'
Here we start to get to the bottom of the dilemma, not an uncommon
one, of the one sided development that typifies so many developping
countries and whose mirror image is being built in the richer nations
as they de-develop. A situation, as in China, where the state has built
itself on the backs of the dispossessed - in this case the peasantry
elsewhere the unemployed.
About 75% of the Chinese people live in small, scattered villages. Up
until recently they have shown a stubborn loyalty to their ancestral
homes which has allowed the government to maintain the traditional
divisions between the rural and the urban and has ensured that any
wealth remains firmly in the cities where an elite can enjoys their
dishwashers whilst the rural majority lack the basics such as
electricity and water.
This, largely illiterate and poorly educated majority, have been up
until now successfully kept in the dark about the situation elsewhere
in the empire but today some TV pictures of the capitalist good life as
seeping through and the traditions on which the peasants have built
their strengths - small units usually based on the family - are coming
under pressure as 50,000,000 descend on Shanghai and other cities
looking for employment. This is seriously destabilising. Last year the
country suffered a setback in food production when grain output
dropped from 456 million tons to 444.5 million tons. With the
population putting 15 million extra people at the dinner table each
year, the Communist Party leadership began sounding the alarm last
winter reported The Guardian (18/4/95). Chinese agriculture is not
capital but labour intensive and with arable land disappearing fast
under 200 new cities the problem of keeping the peasants in their
place so there is food for the elite is becoming accute. "You can't
make money producing crops," said Kou Yongqing, aged 58. "The
only way to make a lot of money is to go to the city. " This is
intolerable for the authorities who announced last month that there
would be a crackdown and those without the necessary
documentation would be sent home.
A SPECIAL TRADE
Mr Hesletine's dream is turning into a nightmare - and in many ways.
Realising that they are not going to sell to the Chinese the west has
decided to sell the Chinese ... with of course the collusion of the
communist party. Such surplus of labour cannot be overlooked as
assembly factories go up in the Special Economic Zones (see
Freedom 14th May 1994). Chinese labour is cheap where a typical
weekly wage in 1994 was =A320. But the Chinese come even cheaper
than this.
The UK press has earlier this year been running stories of Chinese
prisoners being executed to order for an even more grizly trade.
Reports claim that the Chinese authorities use the organs of executed
prisoners to use in medical transplants - the recipients being leading
limelights in the Communist Party or foreigners from Hong Kong,
Japan, Britain and the US "Basically, they look at the prisoner's body
as whatever they want it to be," said Gao Pei Qi, a former member of
China's Public Security Bureau who now lives in exile in London.
''They would take the prisoner's skin, if necessary" reported the New
Yory Times. The whole system is apparently so well organised that
executions are 'scheduled and sometimes ordered' depending on
what's needed.
The US senate hearing where these revelations were made was only
attended by two Senators one of who was conducting the hearing - the
rest of the US political establishment being less concerned with
human rights than with Mr Clinton's own version of 'national
interest'.
REBALANCING THE YIN AND YAN
If you want to know something of the Chinese' State's capacity for
terror and keeping its population in check you should perhaps ask a
Tibetan (see Freedom 28th May 1994) rather than a Focus... article
writer. China has seemingly always been ruled in such a manner: with
an autocratic, centralised power system built on the backs of a
majority.
But there are other strains in Chinese social culture. Such despotism
has always been powerfully countered by a tradition of provincial
insubordination. This continues today (see Freedom 24th June 1995).
In his book Tell the World (1989), Liu Binyan tells of one incident of
how the peasnts took over the council offices for seven months after
the economic plan had told them to grow nothing but green onions
which then resulted in a surplus and the authorities refusing to buy in
a case which epitomises the yin yan disharmony
The other trend in Chinese culture which is also relevant to this issue
is one that is indeed widely spread throughout Asia which is the
importance of the family. The successes that have been the hall mark
of Chinese agriculture over the ages have almost exclusively come
about as a result of the endeavours of the people with this
fundamental organising unit. The word in Chinese for China is made
up of two characters representing the nation and the family also
refelcted in good-old Confusius' musings on organisation where
among five main precepts one relates to government and four to the
family.
The family as a unit is problematic for anarchists given the seemingly
inherent hierarchical traits which it displays. Indeed it is also the main
unit is the more sprawling economic interests emanating from Hong
Kong and further afield. Whether patriarchy is such a problem in Asia
is hard to surmise (consider the case of the Ghandi dynasty in India or
the case of the Indian Govenor who resigned because his mother
disaproved of his political activities).
However as a productive unit in China the family has made its case
and not only in the agricultural sphere. To push a Kropotkinian
analogy futher industry and business in general has always proved
more successful on the smaller scale in China. Whilst the big foreign
boys are running the risk of getting more than their fingers burnt in
China the smaller the better might be the real message. Throughout
China in thousands of small enterprises sweaters, shoes and simple
electronic goods are produced. These 'township and village
enterprises' or TVEs have an up and downside. Collectively the
farmers and small businessment are tranforming China's economy
more then the Japanese and German car industries. By 1990 it was
calculated that these agents (with both foreign and domestic funding)
were producing some 45% of China's industrial output (up from
12% in 1978) whilst Chinese State owned entities accounted for only
25%
Of course the downside is the labour exploitation which still
accompanies so many of these projects - particularly perhaps the ones
which are dependant on Hong Kong dollars. The home grown variety
indicate a more fruitful future course of development for China other
than Mssr. Hesletine, Clinton and Xiaoping's nightmare.
FREEDOM PRESS
http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/Freedom