How Viable Is The Chinese Model?

Asharq Alaswat (English) ^ | 3/3/06 | Amer Taheri

[gusopol3]

In a recent visit to China, the former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked his guide to arrange a meeting with” my old friend Jiang Zemin.”

The guide responded with a dismissive gesture: That person is no longer available.

“That person”, of course, had been China’s President for a decade, before being eased out of office in one of those mysterious palace coups that the country has experienced since the 1970s.

[ckilmer]

Money quote from the article:

"We cannot develop without freedom,” wrote Li Datong, the sacked editor of “ Freezing Point” supplement.

Without, perhaps, knowing it he was echoing Adam Smith, the first modern economist who showed that while despotic regimes may achieve rapid and impressive growth they can never develop a truly modern and self-sustaining economy."

What do other FReepers think about this quote? Doesn't the rapid Chinese economic development create conditions for a self-sustaining economy in the future?
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No. You have the democractic party as a very good model of what happens to a party over time. The vigorous party of o FDR is now a joke. The party that built enormous water works around the country --everything from the TVA to the Hoover Dam to the Grand Coolee now shudders over the fate of snail darters.

The democrats have to have a wilderness experience of 40 years or so to restore their vigor.

Something of the same thing needs to happen to the cpc.


The peaceful way to have that happen is with a democracy.

[ClaireSolt]

They are in a very dependant, derative, copying phase of development. True creativity and originality come with freedom.

They also have many problems to overcome. There is still a huge poor peasant population and much unrest over corruption. The GNP/cap is only $3,000/an.

[appeal2]

Their banks are insolvent and corrupt. Bad loans are spun off to gov't entities where they are promptly hidden. The new money given by the gov't to that bank is then used for more corrupt loans to communist party officials to start up companies. This vicious cycle will not last more than another few years. Eventually a slow down will hit and there will be too many bad loans to hide. As the late Benjamin Graham used to say, "The tree does not grow to the sky." When the elevator operator and shoe shine boy is passing off stock tips, the market is near its peak.

In China, their stock market has been in the crapper for several years with no indication it is about to emerge. What does the market know that we don't?

[ckilmer]

They are in a very dependant, derative, copying phase of development. True creativity and originality come with freedom.

They also have many problems to overcome. There is still a huge poor peasant population and much unrest over corruption. The GNP/cap is only $3,000/an.
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In the same breath you could this about the Indians.

They have no problem with democracy and their borders are far more troubled.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

According to official figures the Chinese hinterland, especially where the ethnic and religious minorities predominate, experienced more than 70,000 “violent incidents”, a euphemism for violent riots, last year. In response, Premier Wen Jiabao proposed agricultural tax cuts and launched a few Potemkin-style “rural development projects.”

Another great article on Red China and the "rest of the story."

The guide responded with a dismissive gesture: [Jiang Zemin] is no longer available.

"What!!" cried Senator Feinstein

China is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign capital, technology, energy resources, and markets. This prevents the creation of an economy geared to meeting the needs of the domestic market: food, health care, education and housing.

It's the trickle up theory. Party cadre get rich.

[IMTOFT]

"My daughter visited the place, was around Shanghai.

She spoke of brothels the size of walmarts here... 5000 whores in them. The lines of men visiting them went for blocks away but they moved at walking speed..."

I travel to China 2-3 times per year, and have spent a good amount of time in and around the Shanghai area, as well as Guangzhou (Canton). I have no idea where your daughter went, but I doubt seriously there are any places as she describes. The Chinese would simply not allow it.

What is prevalent are the young girls from the inner provinces who prostitute themselves openly on the street, and the young men who try to hustle every passerby with counterfeit or stolen goods. Shanghai is an absolutely beautiful city - the skyline of Pudong along the Pu River rivals any city in the world - with modern and old European areas.

But it has a very dark, very sad side. The rich in China are as rich as upper middle class and upper class Americans - but the poor live in far worse conditions than the average person in America under the poverty level.

The Chinese would not tolerate whorehouses the size of WalMarts as that type of behavior is just not Chinese. What they do tolerate (or ignore) is the millions of undocumented citizens illegally plying their trades or their bodies on the streets of the coastal cities. It's truly sad.

The difference between the rich and the poor in China will become a far bigger issue soon for them. I don't know what affect it will have on their political or economic landscape, but I don't think it will be good.

[IMTOFT]

I think you're absolutely right. One of the things that amazes me every time I visit is, with all the new construction and roads, we get lost trying to get to our customers . Even if they had a "mapquest.com" for China, it would be useless as the landscape changes by the week.

The rate of growth and the fact the Chinese economy is pretty inefficient compared to the rest of the developed world makes for a unsustainable situation. The Chinese demand low prices and really only provide cheap labor and copied products. That's hardly the path to a sustainable, creative economy. Their poor agrarian efficiency means they are forced to import more grain and rice every year, the landscape is flush with corruption and their fuel demands are increasing faster than they can provide - something has to give. I'm just hoping that when the Chinese economy hiccups, the rest of the world isn't too badly affected.

In the casual conversations I have with Chinese customers and colleagues, I find most people have little or no regard for the Chinese government. They want to make some money, have a cell phone, maybe a nice car...the logical end of communist rule would be a dull thud when they just become irrelevant.

Unfortunately, the government recognizes this and has become even more oppressive when possible. The crackdown on religion is a good example.

[Republican Party Reptile]

I lived in Shanghai for the past two and half years. Sorry, but such place doesn't exist. While prostitution is in fact rampant, it is also technically still illegal. There is no way the government would turn a blind eye towards anything remotely like what you described.

And it's just not a very Chinese behavior - standing in line for a bonk.

And it's not 90% picking male offsprings, the gender inbalance is something like 1.2 boy to 1 girl since the one child policy went into effect in 1988 - which is significantly out of whack to the norm of 1.05 girl to 1 boy, but it's hardly 90% one gender.

[Cronos]

Will the Manchus, the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the Uighur continue to accept domination by the Han ethnic majority if and when they have a chance to imagine a different future? Isn’t China a Soviet-style empire that might, one day, experience the convulsions that its former Communist rival went through in the 1990s?

interesting question...

[Cronos]

no, he means that China aims not to get more efficiency or productivity, not even after they've captured the market.

[Cronos]

interesting statement -- you are right, the CCP is no longer really communist, more a totalitarian oligarchy.

[Cronos]

Without, perhaps, knowing it he was echoing Adam Smith, the first modern economist who showed that while despotic regimes may achieve rapid and impressive growth they can never develop a truly modern and self-sustaining economy."

I dunno, what about the Pinochet regime in Chile?

[California Patriot]

I don't see any pictures of "Chinese models."

If they're hot, they're "viable." If not, not.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

Deng was more than the mere architect of palace coups. He was also the father of what is known as “The Chinese Model” which consists of combining an authoritarian political regime, symbolised by one-party rule, with a laissez-faire capitalist economic system of the type that Guizot had preached in France in the 1830s.

I can search the web for, Deng Guizot, and I get 116 results with Crusty; about 302 with google

I can search the web for, Deng Lenin New Economic Plan, and I get at least 4,318 results with Crusty; about about 37,000 with google

I can search for, Deng Guizot "The Chinese Model", and I get 1 result with Crusty; about 8 with google

I can search for, Deng Lenin New Economic Plan "The Chinese Model", and I get 13 results with Crusty; about 201 with google

The point: Though of course not all hits were about "The Chinese Model" source the results suggest to me that my belief that Lenin's New Economic Plan (NEP) was the model used by Deng. (Also, why did Deng grill Armand Hammer about his experience with NEP?) To wit, attract Western corporate "useful idiots" to hand over their technology and build modern factories, take 'em for everything you can then send them home with nothing.

The difference is in the 1920's Soviet Union the nepmen were ordinary Russians. When free enterprise got too large the ideologues got scared and ended it and the Russian nepmen. The Chi-coms are smart, they are the nepmen (owners) of most of the wealth. Plus they appear to be stripping the "useful idiots" little by little.

Oddly, I did all four searches two times each. Every time google returned substantially more hits the second time than it did the first time -- a huge difference.

[investigateworld]

later read

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: Crusty

That should be Clusty, clusty.com/

Clusty attempts to group results by categories (clusters) rather than a single list of results.

[pganini]

This guy doesn't know anything about China. The Manchus - what manchus? The Manchurians ruled China under the Ching dynasty and pretty much integrated themselves into the Chinese culture in 300 years they have ruled. There aren't any manchurians left, they have all integrated.

[ClaireSolt]

Agreed. So I don't hyperventilate.

[gogoman]

She spoke of brothels the size of walmarts here... 5000 whores in them. The lines of men visiting them went for blocks away but they moved at walking speed.

In Shanghai? Sorry, but that's the biggest BS I heard all day. Wrong city to BS with. You'd be hard pressed finding any brothel in Shanghai unless you are very well connected (believe me, me and my friends have tried), and the brothels that do exist in Shanghai certainly won't be anywhere as conspicuous as Walmart-sized brothels with lines of men blocks long.

Chinese society is very conservative and puritan. The richer they are, the more conservative they get. Your BS about Walmart sized brothels might have been able to pass in some impoverished Chinese village-town near the Thailand border, but Shanghai? Give me a break.

[gogoman]

There aren't any manchurians left, they have all integrated.

Technically, there are still some Manchus (basically to get tax breaks for being a minority), like maybe a few Manchurian villages, with a median age of around 65.

But you are right, most Manchurians assimilated with the general Chinese population around 200 years ago. One can even argue that the Chinese all became Manchurians. The current Chinese nation-state inherits the Manchurian empire. Many Chinese have a little Manchurian in them. Any notion of "Chinese" or "China" today must take into account the Manchurian assimilation. It's stupid to separate Chinese from Manchurians. There is no "pure" Chinese.