Another reason China is moving toward a more open republic is China’s growing, highly educated middle class. Even most of China’s peasants have seen lifestyle improvements — not as fast as urban areas but there has been growth.
“Growth in (China’s) peasant income, which had reached a rate of 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984, dropped to 2.8% a year from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early 1990s, but stagnation of rural incomes marked the latter part of the decade.” Source: Asia Times
Between 1978 to 1984, rural income improved almost 100% within six years. That growth slowed to 14% between 1986 to 1991.
Yet, Western critics that blast China for this slow growth seldom mention that rural India has stood still for the last twenty years. There must be an unwritten rule about criticizing other democracies, which is censorship.
China’s Western critics act as if they expect an infant to walk the day he or she is born, and run a marathon, become a rocket scientist and a Nobel laureate all within twenty-four hours.
In fact, the West’s Sinophobic critics are the ones guilty of being unfair.
China will open the door to more freedom when China is ready and that door is open wider now than it was in 1976.
I never said “when” China would be finished building a more open, modern republic, and it may never happen until a majority of the people demand it and there may even be bloodshed.
However, the signs are there for anyone who takes the time to look.
When China arrives at that destination is in the hands of the planners, engineers, scientists and architects who lead and rule China—not the Western politicians, the media or Sinophobic critics.
In fact, in 2012, the seventy million members of the Party will have an election and the leadership of China will change again.
However, the West will still refer to the elected president of China’s republic as a dictator without mentioning that in a republic not everyone has the right to vote as it was in America in 1776.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
On October 13, I posted Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines, which referred to a flawed opinion piece in The Economist predicting that the future economic growth of India would eventually surpass China.
I felt that The Economist’s opinion was flawed because it was based primarily on a multi-party democracy being superior to the one-party republic in China.
However, reading that issue of The Economist painted a grim picture for India. It is as if The Economist were promising that India was going to sprout wings and fly – then the piece goes into a long list of facts that prove it cannot happen anytime soon.
The China Law Blog chastised me for being unfair to India. The Blog said, “that he wanted me to provide a super-quick summary of The Economist cover story comparing India with China, but it (I) did not,” which was correct.
In fact, I don’t see how I could have quickly summarized the complexity of India’s economy.
To create an in-depth profile of China, I’ve written hundreds of posts. To talk about the reason India’s economy will not surpass China for a long time led to this post, which may be the longest single post I’ve written.
Sorry, it isn’t a super-quick summary. At thirteen hundred words, it’s just quick.
Next, Manjeet Pavarti challenged my opinion in a comment to the post.
It is obvious that Pavarti must be a nationalist who loves his country—an admirable trait except when a patriot is misguided and possibly misinformed.
In Pavarti’s last comment of October 16 at 01:33, he challenged my sources—a photojournalist (Tom Carter) with extensive experience traveling in China and India, and my use of evidence from The Economist.
To correct the shortcomings of the first post on this topic, I talked to Gurnam S. Brard, the author of East of Indus, My Memoires of Old Punjab. He agreed with my opinion and said there are many in India like Pavarti that refuse to see the problems that hold India back from achieving its potential.
I also talked to Alon Shalev, author of The Accidental Activist. Shalev told me of his extensive trip through India with his wife and his impressions were the same as Tom Carter and Gurnam Brard.
Next, is Foreign Policy magazine’s Prime Numbers, Mega Cities, where there are no opinions—just facts. I’m going to list “three” that are roadblocks to India future economic growth.
WATER — From National Geographic we have Mumbai’s Shadow City by Mark Jacobson—a slum holding 12 million people, who live in the middle of India’s financial capital.
Then there is Delhi with 17.3 million residents. One third of the city’s residents have little access to clean water. See Life in the Slums of Delhi, India
Foreign Policy magazine says, “In India, service delivery (of fresh water) will fall woefully short of demand in coming years across most urban infrastructure sectors.”
China, on the other hand, has long-term infrastructure projects and is drilling the world’s longest tunnel to carry water under hundreds of miles of mountains to reach Manchuria in the northeast from the Yangtze River.
Then in Tibet, China is building reservoirs to catch water from glaciers that are melting due to global warming while building villages to relocate Tibetan nomads who discover that the high altitude grasslands they once depended on to feed their herds has dried up and turned to desert due to lack of rainfall.
LITERACY — For a republic or democracy to thrive and survive the population must be literate to understand the issues and support a complex modern society.
However, only 66% of India’s 1.2 billion people are considered literate—that’s more than four hundred million people who cannot read.
In China, literacy is 93.3% up from 20% in 1978.
“Prior to 1978 … Adult literacy was given first priority in literacy campaigns designed to ‘sweep away illiteracy’ (saochu wenmang). Because 80% of adults were illiterate, they were targeted as crucial for securing new China’s economic security.”
It may sound cliché, but reading was (and continues to be) power, and leaders knew that the literate could have considerable influence.” Source: China Philanthropy
The World Illiteracy Map says, “Illiteracy is one of the major hindrances that come in the way of economic growth. Literate manpower helps a country in developing.”
POVERTY & THE MAOIST REVOLT – Foreign Policy magazine reports that rural poverty in India is turning a Communist Revolt in to a raging resource war. “For India this is no longer rural unrest, but a full-fledged guerrilla war.”
“Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country’s bottom 200 million people. India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet… The number of people going hungry in India hasn’t budged in 20 years.…
“New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore now boast gleaming glass-and steel IT centers and huge engineering projects. But India’s vaster hinterland remains dirt poor—”
China, on the other hand, has managed to contain the Falun Gong problem and the Tibetan and Islamic separatists over the objections of Western human rights activists that cannot stand how China manages unrest.
Due to what many in the West would call brutal measures, harmony and economic progress continue as planned for the vast majority of Chinese.
In addition, in rural China, “Living standards soared in the early 1980s—average incomes doubled in both the cities and the countryside, while there was a boom in both food consumption and the availability of consumer goods.” Source: Socialist Review Index.org.uk
“Growth in (China’s) peasant income, which had reached a rate of 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984, dropped to 2.8% a year from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early 1990s, but stagnation of rural incomes marked the latter part of the decade.” Source: Asia Times
In fact, the last five-year plan extends electricity to rural China and subsidizes the cost of appliances for rural villages once the electricity is turned on
Tom Carter, one of my sources for this post, is currently living in a small rural village in the tea-producing region of China near Hangzhou and has internet access from a village of twenty people.
I agree that India has the potential to surpass China, but I doubt that will happen in the next few decades due to the economic long-term problems that have to be overcome.
I don’t know where Manjeet Pavarti lives, but I suspect it isn’t outside of the gleaming glass and steel cites like New Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore.
People living inside these economic growth bubbles may have no idea how serious it is outside and probably don’t care or India would be dealing with these challenges as China has been doing since Mao died in 1976 when Deng Xiaoping and his supporters ended the Cultural Revolution and rejected Maoism.
India became a democracy in 1947, which means it has had more than sixty years to solve these problems, while China has had less than thirty since 1982 when the Republic got its new constitution.
Isn’t it ironic how the West seldom hears about India’s problems but always hears about every bit of negative news that happens in China.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In a Brief History of Economic Downturns, Business Intelligence says, “At the amusement park that is the American economy, capitalism is a lot like that roller coaster, a never-ending ride with lots of twists, turns, ups, and downs – or booms and busts…”
Nine major economic crashes were listed.
There was the Panic of 1819, which lasted five years.
The Panic of 1826 went for six years.
In 1857, a single major company went out of business and dragged the entire US economy down.
In 1873, Jay Cooke & Company, the largest US bank at the time failed triggering a recession that lasted six years.
The next serious crash was the panic of 1907, causing massive job losses and many business failures.
In 1918, hyperinflation in Europe and the end of US wartime production caused a brief but severe downturn in the American economy.
The Great Depression imploded in 1929 with the collapse of the stock market and the American banking system and wouldn’t end until the beginning of World War II.
In 1973, the price of gas at the pump soared leading to long lines to fill gas tanks.
Then the Dot–Com Bubble burst in combination with 9/11/2001.
When the sub-prime mortgage bubble exploded in the U.S. in 2008, about 80,000 private owned businesses in China went out of business and 15 to 20 million workers lost jobs – much bigger numbers than the U.S. suffered.
However, within a few weeks, those who had lost their jobs in China were back at work or had returned to rural China to the collective farm.
Why should China cave in to pressure from America and Europe and turn its economy into another Wild West show?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
In Unbalanced Chinafrom The Wall Street Journal’s The Source, Alen Mattich lists dire predictions of how an imbalanced Chinese society may crash economically.
Anything is possible. However, if China crashes, the first sound we hear may be the U.S. hitting the ground.
Alen Mattich lists the possibility of a trade war between the U.S. and China which could “threaten to bankrupt whole swathes of industry” if China doesn’t devalue its currency, the yuan.
Mattich is betting this prediction on other countries joining the U.S. in a trade war with China. Some may join but the odds are many will not.
Recently, the BRIC, Turkey, France, Japan and several oil-rich Middle East countries have sided with China against the shaky dollar, and countries like Brazil that depend on trade with China won’t side with the U.S.
Then Mattich mentioned the possibility of China’s properly bubble bursting. The urban property bubble in China represents about 15% of China’s economy and 40% of that property belongs to China’s newly minted millionaires.
In rural China, most of the land belongs to peasant collectives and the government.
In America, when the property bubble burst in 2008, that represented more than 70% of the U.S. economy.
Then the Chinese save an average of about 40% of earnings so the Chinese are not cash poor as the average American, who carries a lot of credit card debt.
Mattich also mentioned China’s aging population. Since 700 million Chinese work in jobs that are not linked to the export-import sector of the economy, I doubt if that will play much of a factor.
When Mattich mentions the one-child policy, he doesn’t say this only applies to the urban population of about 500 million.
The other 700 million rural Chinese are not bound by the one-child policy, and the 56 minorities in China that number 100 million have no restrictions on the number of children families may have.
The problems with many Western predictions about China’s economic future is that they are based on Western lifestyles and spending habits. China’s formula is different.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The West, America in particular, has been pressuring China for years to revalue the yuan. If the following reports are correct, it seems the US may have lost the fight.
During elections, U.S. politicians often used this issue with China as a scapegoat for lost jobs without mentioning that more jobs have gone to Canada and Mexico since NAFTA was signed.
In fact, I seldom hear or read in the major media about the estimated 11 million jobs that have gone to illegal aliens working in the U.S.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Turkey joined China to shun the U.S. dollar in conducting trade that is expected to grow to $50 billion within five years and $100 billion by 2020.
Another potential blow to the U.S. dollar’s global dominance was reported by Bloomberg Business Week.
Bloomberg says that the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will put up a “strong resistance” to currency controls at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington.
The 24-7 Christian News.com says that the U.S. Dollar will no longer be the global currency predicting that the world is going to detach from the US economy in the near future. “China, Russia, Japan and France, several Middle East Arab states have taken the initiative to detach oil from the US Dollar.”
Instead, these countries plan to trade in a currency basket consisting of Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan, the Euro, etc.
Then Goldman Sachs predicts a sharp slump in the US dollar’s value against other major currencies. Source: Credit Write Downs.com
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
iLook China 