{"id":2183,"date":"2011-12-31T03:00:28","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T07:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=2183"},"modified":"2011-12-31T22:07:10","modified_gmt":"2012-01-01T02:07:10","slug":"an-assessment-of-chinas-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2011\/12\/an-assessment-of-chinas-future\/","title":{"rendered":"An Assessment of China’s Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

An earlier article in this website “An Assessment of America’s Future<\/a>” pointed out that there are fundamental problems facing the U.S.\u00a0 Unless the American government and citizens acknowledge the existence of these fundamental problems and are courageous to address seriously the root causes of these problems, the U.S. will no longer continue to be the richest and most powerful country in the world.\u00a0 This however does not necessarily mean, as some people concluded, that China will replace the U.S. as the richest and most powerful country in the world, because in many respects there are still large gaps between the U.S. and China, and more importantly, China also needs to solve its own problems.\u00a0 This article provides an assessment of China’s future.<\/p>\n

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First, I want to point out that there are two polarizing camps in assessing China.\u00a0 One camp thinks that China is a completely dictatorial country that internally treats its citizens with disdain and callousness, and externally treats its neighbors and other countries with aggression and unfairness.\u00a0 Another camp thinks that China’s various shortcomings are just minor transitional problems from a country transforming itself from a semi-feudal rural society to a modernized industrialized society.\u00a0 I first discuss the assessment of these two camps which I loosely called the “Essentially Totally Negative Camp” and the “Essentially Totally Positive Camp,” and then discuss the major problems that China must address and overcome if it wants to become a rich and powerful country.<\/p>\n

“Essentially Totally Negative Camp”:<\/strong> This camp depicts China as a country with a government that ignores the needs and wishes of its citizens, with the welfare of its people far from the minds of the leaders making the decisions.\u00a0 The reality is that China before 1949 was even backward compared with other Asian countries and was known as the “Sick Man of Asia.”\u00a0 Since 1949 it has achieved not only national unity and independence, but during the last 60+ years it has achieved the highest rate of growth of any major economy in the world.\u00a0 Furthermore, this progress was not made in just the last 30 years.\u00a0 For example, the life expectancy of its people was already raised from 35 years in 1949 to 68 years in 1980 [1]. \u00a0 In addition, in spite of major mistakes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it was during the first 30 years that the essential foundation of China’s industrial revolution was laid.\u00a0 Land reform, introduced shortly after the 1949 revolution, eliminated the thousand-year gentry-landlord ruling class.\u00a0 This not only provided land to the poor rural population, it laid the foundation to channel the agrarian surplus (i.e., the fruits of labor of the rural population) to financing state-sponsored industrialization. [2]<\/p>\n

This camp also depicts China to have invaded Tibet and destroyed the livelihood of a minority.\u00a0 The reality is that Tibet has been part of China since the Yuan Dynasty more than 700 years ago, and Tibet before 1949 was a theocratic, semi-feudal, and semi-slave society in which the very small ruling class of landlords and religious leaders (who were also the largest landlords) ruled over the very large class of serfs and slaves, with essentially little educational opportunity for the overwhelming majority of the people.\u00a0 Furthermore, it is a well-documented historical fact that many Dalai Lama’s or Dalai Lama candidates died at a very young age due to poisons or outright murders by other scheming, power-hungry, competing religious leaders.\u00a0 These were the types of religious leaders of the “Shangri-La” society often depicted as pre-1949 Tibet by Western movie stars, media, and government leaders.\u00a0 The reality is that Tibetans are no longer serfs or slaves to the landowners and religious leaders; their life expectancy has more than double; they have much better healthcare, educational, and job opportunities. [3]\u00a0 It is important to remind ourselves of the United Nations’ 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that proclaimed that all people were entitled to enjoy a decent standard of living, have access to adequate medical care, and have an opportunity for a proper education.<\/p>\n

Externally this camp depicts China as manipulative in its currency policy and blames the U.S.’s economic problems on the trade balance between the two countries.\u00a0 In reality, the U.S. is a capitalist society, and capitalism seeks to maximize its profits.\u00a0 If it can accomplish that by going oversea to manufacture due to lower cost, then that is the capitalist road.\u00a0 Furthermore, it is very misleading to conclude that because a lot of the American consumer products are made in China, it is therefore losing a lot of jobs to China.\u00a0 What one neglects to say is that many of the components that go into the products being assembled in China came from many other countries, including the U.S., and the profits from the large differences between the retail price and the wholesale import price create jobs for Americans and end up in the pockets of American companies. [5]\u00a0 Furthermore, for a product like Apple’s iPhone, it is selling like hotcakes to the Chinese in China even though its price in China is $625 US (as compared to $500 in the U.S.).\u00a0 However, because the iPhone is manufactured (i.e., assembled) in China, selling the iPhone to the Chinese in China is not considered as export from the U.S. to China.\u00a0 If doing the trade deficit calculation properly, then one could get a much different picture of the trade deficit issue, and in some cases the trade deficit could even become a trade surplus for the U.S. relative to China! [6]\u00a0 This camp also neglects to say that by constantly printing more money, the U.S. government is essentially reducing the debt that it owes China.\u00a0 Instead of trying to address the root causes of the U.S.’s economic problems, it uses China as a scapegoat.<\/p>\n

This camp also depicts China as a super aggressive country who wants to dominate and seize territories from its neighboring countries.\u00a0 The reality is that China has not shown any actions in any way similar to the imperialistic aggressions that many, many foreign powers have inflicted on China for the past 170 years ever since the First Opium War in 1840.\u00a0 With respect to disputes over territorial sovereignty on various islands in the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia, invariably China\u00a0 has good arguments to support its claims that historically these have been Chinese territories, but often due to China being weak for so long and due to interference from foreign imperialistic powers, it has left some of these territorial disputes unsettled. [4]<\/p>\n

It is unfortunate not only for China, but for the long-term welfare of the U.S. and for world peace, that the U.S. mass media and government leaders have consistently, and more so recently, been\u00a0 firmly in this Essentially Totally Negative Camp, and have adopted a very antagonistic and confrontational attitude toward China.\u00a0 There is no reason to believe that the U.S. mass media and government leaders do not know better, they purposely adopt this political expediancy to deflect the public’s attention from their failed policies to using China as a scapegoat.<\/p>\n

“Essentially Totally Positive Camp”: <\/strong>This camp is just the opposite of the Essentially Totally Negative Camp.\u00a0 When people point out about some of the bad things that have happened or are happening now in China, this camp’s advocates would invariably say that that is just a growing pain or transitional problem from China transforming itself from a semi-feudal, rural society to a modernized, industrialized society, and these problems will go away with time.\u00a0 For example:<\/p>\n