To get rich is glorious

Thus spake Deng Xiaoping almost forty years ago, as he opened up the struggling Communist China to the world.

Source

China has transformed in a hurry since then.  And with a clueless pussygrabber as the American president who is increasingly bogged down with various political issues, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, is playing an awesome global game making his, and China's, presence known all over the world.

To celebrate China’s new global influence, Mr. Xi is gathering dozens of state leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in Beijing on Sunday.
It is global commerce on China’s terms.
Mr. Xi is aiming to use China’s wealth and industrial know-how to create a new kind of globalization that will dispense with the rules of the aging Western-dominated institutions. The goal is to refashion the global economic order, drawing countries and companies more tightly into China’s orbit.

Today is that Sunday, as I blog.  While all that is happening, most of my fellow citizens don't even know the name of China's president, but I digress!  Two other strongman-leaders were in attendance:

Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey also spoke at the opening ceremony.

The pussygrabber adores those three because he realizes that the American president cannot ever get the kinds of power those strongmen have, but I digress.

Unlike the pussygrabber, Xi knows well the old stories, like this one:

Source

Xi wants to continue to remind the world about China.  His ambitious project is about those old glories, which will take on a 21st century twist.  But, the Economist noted that Xi's modern day Silk Road plan is "running into three linked problems."

First, it is unclear what its priorities are, or who is running it. ...
A second problem is finding enough profitable projects to match the vaulting ambition of the scheme, which aims to create a Eurasian trading bloc rivalling the American-dominated transatlantic area. ...
Third, locals in some countries are angry about what they view as China’s heavy-handedness.

All these are wonderful fodder for me.  In one course that I am teaching this term, this upcoming week is all about the China model for economic development.  In another, I will have students think about some of the issues related to China--from the treatment of Uighurs to the territorial disputes in South China Sea.

If only people would listen to me and recognize the urgency to understand and respect China, instead of voting to power the pussygrabber who talks about "gina"!

How wonderful is the Chinese model to development?

As a teenager, when I started worrying-yes, worrying--about the ills that seemingly were all around in India, the communist parties looked quite attractive an option to me.  They promised to take care of the disadvantaged, and it resonated with me.

It didn't take me long, however, to understand that in politics, the color of the stripe didn't matter at all and that every party was out to screw the people.  It then boiled down to who was the least worst because there wasn't any "good" option.

Over the years, as much as I have accepted a liberal democratic capitalism as the least screwy of all the options humans have tried out thus far, there remains a nagging feeling all the time: are we doing anything for the horribly disadvantaged?

This is the question that then makes me obsess over the India versus China comparisons. 

Thus, reading a book review essay in the NYRB made my Sunday :)

The book is about China's development and Deng Xiaoping's role in the country's "transformation."  wonderful essay where the reviewer brings in a personal dimension too, and opens the piece by highlighting how much the China model appeals to many other developing countries for all the wrong reasons:

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

China came down hard on "Occupy Tiananmen" and the country continues to be a notorious poster for the lack of human rights.

Even as most of the world has been awed by its economic success and countries like Rwanda want to emulate this model of a strong pro-capitalist state that tightly constrains individual freedoms, the reviewer writes about how much the economic growth has benefited whom:

the claim that Deng “lifted” millions from poverty confuses the doer and the receiver of action. To the extent that economic “lifting” has happened in post-Mao times, it has been the menial labor of hundreds of millions of people—working without labor unions, or a free press, or a neutral judiciary, or protections like OSHA rules—that has done the heavy lifting. This workforce has improved not just the lives of the millions themselves but, even more, of the Communist elite, who in many cases have soared to stratospheric heights of opulence. World Bank figures show that in China the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality in populations, has skyrocketed from 0.16 before Deng’s reforms to a current 0.47, near the high end of the scale. This dramatic change has much less to say about “hundreds of millions” than it does about one of the maxims that Deng delivered at the outset of reform: “Let a part of the population get rich first.”

While in graduate school, which was when I got to watch on television the tanks in Tiananmen Square, I always hesitated discussing such topics with graduate students from China.  It was almost an unwritten rule that this topic was off limits.  Once, I accidentally crossed that line and asked a classmate, "R," about Tibet.  He sensed where I was going and immediately made it clear that Tibet is, and always has been, a part of China and that the government would, therefore, take every possible to step to keep the country whole.

The simplistic bottom-line seems to be that the China model provides economic growth and keeps the country unified, whereas the India model struggles with both.

After all these years of formal and casual approaches to understanding these issues, I find that I haven't resolved anything in my mind.

Should I consider such a lack of resolution as a sign of intellectual and moral weakness on my part, or as a sign of continued and healthy engagement on such topics of vital importance?

China @ 60 ... continued

China's 60 years neatly falls into two 30-year periods--from 1949 until 1979, when Deng Xiaoping opened up China's economy and proclaimed that "to get rich is glorious."  The second thirty years have been about China's rapidly growing economic strength and the millions who are no longer poor and starving.
But, as Perry Link at the NY Review of Books writes:

Defenders of the Communist Party’s record argue that “the second thirty years” are very different from the first. “Reform and opening” has brought economic growth, higher living standards, integration with the world, and greater flexibility in daily life. These indeed are important advances over the Mao period, but to “credit” them to China’s ruling elite, rather than to the billion or so people who are ruled, is a bit perverse. Imagine things from the point of view of an ordinary Chinese worker: a brutal regime has its foot on your neck for years; then it relents, but says “now you may make money, but only that—no politics, no wayward religion, no trouble-making.” So you take the one category of freedom you are offered and pour everything into it.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese have taken this deal, and have worked long and hard, for low wages, often in sweatshops, with no unions, no medical insurance, no workers’ compensation, no recourse to independent courts—and have made money, at least more than they had before. About a quarter of the population still lives in dire poverty, while the ruling elite, now leaders of a large political-economic interest group, has been catapulted to wealth and even to gaudy opulence. Economic polarization is now greater in China than in the U.S. (where it has been growing). The Communist Party credits itself with “lifting millions from poverty,” but it is more accurate to say that the millions have lifted the Party.

I like the way Perry Link describes it.

Tiananmen Square: Twenty years ago

In 1979, Deng Xiaoping opened up China to the global economy. Ten years later, there were protests for political openness too. Which is when we watched on television the remarkably surreal video of a lone man standing up to a column of military tanks.