awesome www.stuffforelsa.blogspot.com is actually available.
so yeah anyway hi whoever is reading this really dry blog here's my first post:
Spur Creativity? China must be careful of what it wishes for.
This article talks about how the Chinese authorities have to be wary of an expanding middle class depending more political rights and true political representation, as China is still a one-party supposed democracy in which the citizens are allowed to choose which member of parliament within the party will be in charge of the different parts of the country.
While i may agree that an expanding middle class (wrongly equated with intelligentsia; may be true in other countries but not in China) would eventually lead to them questioning authority, i fear many people either overestimate or misunderstand China's development.
Firstly, as quoted in the article, Ivy League president Richard Levin thinks that the 4 main stumbling blocks for China's development would be
1. expansion of development is too fast for expansion of the reach of the law
2. environmental problems (linked to 4 - explain later)
3. inequality of income wealth
4. running out of momentum after expansion burns out
Obviously (obvious to me, i wouldn't know about everyone else :D) the above completely rule out the possibility of the intelligentsia suddenly rising against the government, as Taiwan or Japan or even America etc would have hoped.
Firstly, the expansion of development is too fast for the expansion of articles in the law, which means that since the business sector would be expanding so quickly that the law cannot catch up, currently it is very probably for corruption to be prevalent in the business sector as from the top-down, corruption above forces corruption below in order to meet the demands of the corrupt above, and so on. The sheer number of loopholes in Chinese law which soon becomes obsolete in the face of new economic development should allow too many ways for corrupt businessmen, province directors, etc to abuse their power. This not only suppresses the intelligentsia, it also limits their ability to "do anything" against the system as they themselves are too constrained by it. For example, they would have to occupy themselves paying taxes and such rather than writing treatises on the unfairness of Chinese government.
I'll touch on the third point as 2 and 4 are linked. As ANYONE would have expected (and frankly, i think anyone who believes otherwise must be downright ignorant) a developing country would have a HUMONGOUS income disparity, which would technically, in China's case, mean that a few industralists oppress this huge bunch of workers from rural areas who are part of a huge wave of rural-urban migration as truckloads rush to work for low pay and generally not much better lives than their rural ones.
What is the significance of this, you may ask. Well this means that the expanding middle-class in China is extremely happy with the current government (keeping in mind that now we are referring to the prefectorial/provincial governments, and not the central government, who has next to no knowledge/concern/control over day-to-day affairs in the prefectorials and provinces) , seeing as their way of easy bribery and such affairs lead to a convenient system in which those with capital get to slowly get richer in a system where the huge workforce of low-wage workers allow themselves to be exploited for the monetary benefit of the company or boss.
AS SUCH, what the foreigners see as development in terms of GDP are the products of a workforce that is so unprecedentedly huge slaving away for their employers everyday, and not the development of the CHINESE as a whole - one could say China was the car moving forward where its people are in the mud pushing the car.
It's 19th century Russia all over again - the rich get richer, the poor remain the same, nobody really cares, you should be lucky you got a job because there are millions of other people competing with you to earn the same 1 US dollar a day sewing Adidas shoes for 10 hours or so.
As long as the Chinese government maintains their system effectively, I dont think there would be many "Neo"s breaking out of the Matrix to challenge the Machines. The rich who are allowed to remain rich are happy, the poor who remain poor have been poor throughout due to China's wonderful communist policies and as such see not much difference, and this is a scenario that happens everytime a communist country slowly becomes capitalist. It's almost expected, really.
As for the points 2 and 4, China's current development is fueled by its : massive natural reserves, and massive human resources. When natural reserves run out, or China is pressured internationally to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the first fuel would be gone. When the number of MNCs and TNCs in China set up so many factories that all the workers are hired, in a free market situation, workers would start demanding higher pay, which would lead to a pretty sizeable middle class (rise of education), which would lead to China losing her advantage in terms of dirt-cheap labor, which would lead to disastisfaction (rise of political awakening) and as everyone knows, education + political awakening equals revolution. Well, that's what the Chinese communists say anyway.
Capisce? It's not hard to understand you know, why all this huge fuss about China is just an easily collapsible wave. Everyone believes in China, so everyone invests. Everyone invests, so theres development, and returns. Returns lead to more people investing, etc. Or maybe it's all just an excuse for me to not bother about Chinese as usual.
