Spanish
The 6 castaways
Suppose six castaways on a desert island, five Asians and one American. They decide to share the work as follows: an Asian would be in charge of hunting, fishing another, another gathering, another of supply of firewood and other food preparation. The American will eat and take care of the rest of the day sunbathing. Asians subsist with the leftovers. Economists say that the U.S. is the only engine of economic growth of the island and that without his excellent appetite Asians would be unemployed.
The pro-capitalist reforms undertaken since the death of Mao for the reintroduction of global capitalism into China have been presented as a kind of fairy tale. China would be heading rapidly towards a modern and advanced society, (such as Japanese or Korean cases) with middle-class consumers, which could even overtake the U.S. or Europe in a few decades.
The reality is more prosaic. Of course, reforms have transformed China's economy from head to toe. The state enterprise sector has declined from 100% in 1978 to less than 40% at present and its contribution to China's GDP has fallen to less than 20%. The state still controls the subsidiary sectors (petrochemical, electricity, coal and metals) but Chinese growth depends in extreme degree on exports of multinationals operating in the country. In 1990 exports accounted for 16% of GDP. In 2006 they exceeded 40%.
There has been a kind of global great division of labor. Transnational corporations have turned China into a completely oriented export economy while the state sector has specialized, meekly, to broaden the bases, supply and export infrastructures for that platform.
Asia was in permanent emergency situation during the Cold War. Japan and the Asian "tigers", U.S. allies, were provided with generous financial and military aid and, especially, the opening of Western markets for their products. The economic "miracle" was linked to the fear of communist expansion. Japan specialized in high value-added production, the 4 tigers in intermediate production and aspiring tigers in labor intensive producing. It was a capitalism with a human face, unions, decent wages and middle class consumers.
Under the Asian old industrial order, each "tiger" specialized in the export of a specific group of finished products. But the system was based on an imbalance that was getting greater every year. Asia exported more than it imported. The difference was invested in U.S. treasury bonds, which allowed Reagan cut taxes and thus stimulate Western consumption. Soon Asian economies become major U.S. creditors.
But as Keynes said, if you owe a thousand dollars to a bank that's your problem but if you owe a million, is the bank who has the problem. Most Asian countries would shed some titles in encreasingly devalued dollars but they had to keep buying them if they wanted to continue exporting. So Japan and the Asian Tigers had to continue to finance the increasing twin deficits (budget and trad ) of his gigantic client.
Following the 1985 Plaza Accord, the U.S. forced a drastic revaluation of the Yen relative to the $ to fix the huge trade imbalance with Japan. The response of the Japanese capital ( the Keiretsu in collusion with the government) was to create a platform for exports in the Asian mainland. Between 1985 and 1990 more than $ 15,000 million in direct investment landed in Southeast Asia. South Korea and Taiwan would soon follow.
In this new model the old tigers offshore intensive labor processes to mainland countries with lower wages installing key in hand factories in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, ..., to assemble the components from former Asian tigers.
It was in these circumstances that the Chinese bureaucracy was incorporated into the system by offering docile cheap labor, rigidly framed, and a huge ecological space to destroy.
Since 1990, not only former Asian tiger multinationals were operatings from China but the vast majority of the planet multinationals joined the system, relocating much of its production plants to China who became the low-cost platform of export consumption production worldwide.
The corrupt Chinese bureaucracy had much to offer to global capitalism. Three decades of Maoism (1949-1976) had put on foot a country ravaged by imperialism. China experienced rapid growth in its infrastructure that propeled the development of agriculture and industry. A mid 1970s China occupied the 6th place among the most industrialized countries and had an advanced research and development sector (since the 1950s had developed several generations of computers, often with nothing to envy to the global capitalist powers). There was not great social inequalities and educational level and health care were enviable for a population around 1,000 million.
After backing down to global capitalism Chinese leaders did not hesitate to defame Mao methods and devalue the achievements of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to justify the need for their "reforms".
Initially the "reformists" to win the support of the Chinese masses, raised prices the state paid to farmers and promoted the equal sharing of communes between rural families, which lead to an increase in the percentage of farm income on total National Income from 30% to 44% between 1978-1984.
Having secured the reformist path, the agricultural sector was sacked in favor of the capitalist exporter sector. There was a sustained net transfer of resources from the countryside to the city (via taxes, government spending, transfers of bank deposits and loans) with the result of a rapid decline in agricultural income and a social crisis that began to expel population at an exponential rate.
One of the keys to the Chinese economic "miracle" has been internal migration which represents 70 % of manufacturing employment and over 80 % of employment in construction. It is estimated that between 150 and 200 million rural people have migrated to the cities. Although remaining years in the cities , they and even their children born in the city, are classified as " rural" and must pay substantial sums for their temporary urban residence "permits", permits that are not entitled to education, health, housing or state pensions. This is the Chinese equivalent for "undocumented" immigrants in Europe and North America (the cheap slavery XXI century). The peasants driven from the field are kept permanently in an irregular situation, with no rights of any kind, and in many cases, even with no contract at all , to be exploited with impunity by legions of subcontractors working for the large multinationals.
With a low domestic demand the model performance depends on consumption in the U.S. and Europe. Japan, Korea and Taiwan export intermediate goods to China who also attracts imports from the Philippines, Malaysia and Australia. But the goods assembled by Chinese industry are almost entirely exported to U.S. and Europe.
In addition, the model is doomed to implode as it involves the progressive industrial relocation and impoverishment of Western consumers. Since the late 1990 's "globalization " just resisted with increasing doses of credit that were added in successive speculative bubbles.
With the financial collapse, the whole "global" framework created after the Plaza Accord crumbled .
The Chinese reaction against their Western customers crisis has been engaging in a hellish race to increase its industrial and export capacity ( where are they going to export?), A kind of oriental cheap credit bubble, a outrageous public investment and housing bubble Japanese style or Spanish that triggered up the prices of the planet raw materials.
China buys long-term USA government debt as placement of its huge trade surpluses. If China stop doing it the mountains of accumulated currency would force the rise of the exchange rate of the yuan against the dollar. So buying U.S. debt, China is subsidizing its export sector and thus the profits of multinationals operating in their territory (many of USA private property)
A common topic of business magazines is the "Chinese locomotive" . The western economic recovery would be achieved by pressing the Chinese government to implement a policy of market liberalization in order to rebalance trade with the West (raising the exchange rate of the Yuan and opening its domestic market to Western products).
The argument assumes that Chinese workers would end up earning decent wages to act as global consumers. But decent wages would sink the “competitiveness” of Chinese multinational export platform. In fact Chinese private consumption relative to GDP had fallen from 47% in 1992 to 36% in 2006 (in the U.S. is over 70%). The decline in the wage share in the overall Chinese income has been one of the worst of the world.
China has jumped on the inequality and social polarization global podium (2nd after Nepal). At present, China can boast rank second (only behind the U.S.) in terms of dollar billionaires. Yachts, private jets, super luxury sports cars, residential and exclusive clubs, big wild game, LVMH, Moët, Hennessy Louis Vuitton , ... are the only “consumer” sectors with certain prospects in China.
The problem is that large multinational companies are not interested in this roadmap. They have designed a complex transnational network in which Asian industrial powers export parts and components to China where they are assembled and exported to the West. China has become the centerpiece of the scheme increasing its share in information technology and communication products sector from less than 3% of total world exports in 1992 to 24% in 2006.
Currently over 60% of U.S. imports from China come from the factories installed in that country by U.S. multinationals. To Western "nations ", to its unemployed workers, they should yuan appreciation but to multinationals, including U.S. , no.
The threat to industrial activity and Westerners jobs depends on the relationships between states or nations but due to the current operative transnational oligopolies that have made China the world's assembly shop . The locomotive , in any case, pull the large multinational corporations.
Two phases can be distinguished in this process.
In the 1980s Chinese per capita GDP was 14 times lower than in the USSR. Over 70% of the workforce were farmers (14% in the USSR). Chinese planning had always been much less rigid and more decentralized than Soviet. The authorities of the provinces and municipalities enjoyed a certain autonomy (that the Cultural Revolution had increased) unknown in central USSR.
After Mao's death , between 1976 and 1992 followed a series of reforms aimed, in theory, to the gradual introduction of market relations in socialism. This process proved the falsity of the alleged incompatibility between bureaucracy and capitalist market. By contrast, the prerogatives of the bureaucracy resulted not only not antagonistic with the market but perfectly compatible, coexisting and mutually reinforcing, facilitating the process of privatization and division of assets and means of production.
The grain prices were increased. Then began a phase of experimental reform in the provinces of Anhui and Sichuan in which the communes were disbanded and the use of land vested equally between farmers allowing them to grow what they wanted after completing the required supplies to the state (family responsibility system). After the generalization of this experience throughout the country, the result was a significant increase in production and farm income.
In this first phase, urban China remained dominated by the public sector but it was allowed the emergence of small familiar private companies r with the option of employing up to 7 employees as additional workforce. From 1984 market relations gradually replaced planning for resource allocation. It was allowed to public companies retain a portion of the benefits that were generally used to improve the living conditions of employees or invested in a wide collection of services related to the production unit and including apartment complexes, clinics, schools, shops, cafes, sports and leisure facilities.
Thus the dominance of large public sector units was complemented by a private marginal sector.
The de-collectivization was completed in 1984, giving way to households farmers who did not own land but obtained an assignment of it in good conditions. At the same time, given that rural industry was outside of central planning, factories in rural areas, promoted and managed by local authorities, began to be build, based mainly on the area workforce.
However, in rural areas near the "Special Economic Zones" (southwest of Guangdong and Fujian) entrepreneurs who came from Hong Kong and Taiwan developed capitalist companies although officially registered as 'collective companies'.
Thus, in the period between 1978 and 1992, except for the Special Economic Zones, the Chinese economy was divided between two sectors: a large industrial public sector and a growing private sector in which family production relations prevailed. It was still a market economy coexisting with a powerful planned sector.
Private capitalism is nothing new in China. Although there were capitalist enterprises before 1949, they constituted only a small part of the economy. However, between these two dates (1992-2000) the entire Chinese economy has been converted to the capitalists parameters.
After the famous " Southern Tour " of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 - " to get rich is glorious" - the Chinese Communist Party leadership officially adopted the goal of a “socialist market economy " which, in the Chinese context, meant an accelerated march towards global capitalism based on a brutal process of primitive accumulation of capital, in which public assets are systematically converted into private equity and appropriated by the capitalist bureaucratic class, using state coercion mechanisms.
In the 1990s the majority of state and collective ownership enterprises in China were privatized. Between 1996 and 2004 the number of state enterprises was reduced by 40% and 36 million state or collective workers were laid off. The proportion of urban workers in the public sector fell from 82% to 26% . Only between 2005 and 2006, six million more were redundant, Chinese officials said. The remaninig public sector workers lost their job security, health care, child care, pensions and housing and were reduced to outright workforce exploited by domestic and foreign capitalists.
The rules limiting the size of private companies and restricting foreign investment were lifted. While small Chinese entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore found local partners to set up business in the villages and towns of the mainland, Korean and Japanese multinationals and soon also the North American and European , found them in the highest level of the corrupt bureaucracy. In 2000 almost one third of Chinese industry was yet taken over by foreign capital. In 2007 more than two thirds of the industrial sector was in the hands of foreign multinationals.
Under this slogan, China proceeded to a thorough restructuring of the remaining large public enterprises under the "corporate" standard model of the great transnational corporations . Its assets were converted into shares listed in the stock exchange. The state reserved a controlling stake in strategic sectors (banking, oil, steel, energy, telecommunications and weapons). The structure of these companies has been redesigned to respond to profit as its main goal, firing in the process more than 50 million employees.
The new “Chinese” multinationals - CNPC, CNOOC, Sinopec, SINOCHEM, , Lenovo, ... - , operate according to the unscrupulous procedures and criminal conduct codes of their Western counterparts, traded on the international stock exchanges, are involved in mergers and acquisitions and acquire strategic reserves of fossil fuels and minerals in competition with Shell, Exxon , ... in Níger, Nigeria, Angola, Congo, ect. ), hire top Western CEOs - with no record of their salaries - and bribe corrupt governments and gain sufficient weight to participate in international oligopolistic markets.
"Release the small" meant the privatization of everything else according to the Russian pattern. Small and medium-sized enterprises of urban, local or village areas, were privatized in a process of expropriation and privatization of resources at a scale and speed that has never been recorded in history (except the Russian case).
Private Capitalism need capitalist and as usual accumulation processes are murky and shameful. As in Russia, the first generation of "capitalist" is carrying out their particular "primitive accumulation of capital" based on the appropriation and systematic theft of all the country's resources. Embezzlement , commissions, kickbacks, fraud money, currency manipulation , forced land and farms expropriations, ... with the invaluable collaboration of Western industrial joint ventures, hotel chain companies, real estate, .. converted into real cheerleaders of the "communist" Chinese authorities.
In rural areas, devastated and impoverished by pollution, evictions and abuse of local authorities, the dismantling of the communes has meant the demise of health care and public education. Over one hundred million have migrated to the "special zones" and large cities, forming the world's largest army of cheap labor.
The salary of a Chinese worker accounted for 4% of that of an American in 2004 and probably was lower given the unreliability of Chinese statistics. So Chinese consumption has grown much less than its total production. The massive Chinese expansion has been fueled by investments and exports. The share of wages in China's GDP decreased from 51-52% in the 80 to less than 38% in the first years of the new millennium with the consumption share dropping from 50-52% to 36% in the same period.
But the model is far from that followed by Japan and Korea in the postwar period. There have appeared a "middle class" equivalent to those existing in developed countries. Chinese capitalism, such as Russian, has been reborn with a huge and growing social polarization degree. What for the Russian new capitalism has meant the exploitation of oil and raw materials, for the Chinese has been the exploitation of the masses of impoverished migrant peasants put at the service of the great transnational corporations.
Between the kleptocrats millionaires and the workers has developed only a thin social layer mainly composed by foremen, labor traffickers, corrupt officials, gangsters and mobsters, small businessmen (already threatened by Wal Mart and other chains of supermarkets) and professionals or technicians. In total they would not reach 70 million thanks to the merciless exploitation of 200 million workers and ecological destruction across the country, with the rest 1,000 million sinking in misery.
The Chinese Communist Party has turn into a kleptocratic mafia, Russian style, with the particularity of a " more orderly "transition” and maintaining a dictatorial state structure with the function to faciliate the largest capitalist exploitation of planet labor to the benefit of the transnational corporations.
The children and grandchildren of PCC leaders occupy the majority ( between 85 and 90% ) of senior executive positions in the areas of finance and insurance, export, real estate and engineering. A third of the 800 richest Chinese (2007) are members of the CCP, 38 of whom are delegates of the National People's Congres . The rest have family connections with party members or officials.
The capitalist restructuring of the Chinese bureaucracy has been done under the direction of the transnational corporations which in exchange for premiums, some shares deliveries and bribery, have framed an army of cheap and docile labor, and acquired a whole continent to steal its resources, exploit, deplete and destroy.
Defenders of the system say the huge growth has resulted in substantial increases in income, even for the most disadvantaged.
Although official statistics manufacturing wages doubled between 2002 and 2008 (from $2/h to 4$/h), the fact is that the percentage of wages to GDP has steadily decreased throughout the period ( 56,5 % in 1983, 53% in 1992, 36.7% in 2005) while the corporate profits have steadily climbed.
The deceptive "per capita income" index may indicate that urban residents enjoy lucky incomes well above those of the previous decade. But rent comparisons conceal income loss in previously subsidized goods and services as housing, transportation , food, energy, health and education . The annual income of the limited group of Highest paid cadres and professional of the 1980s was no more than 1,400 yuan on average and yet they lived under conditions similar to the Western middle classes. In 2006 , the average annual income of most urban exceed 3,800 yuan, however they live in damaged apartments, unable to afford to see a doctor and having trouble making ends meet.
It is also false that have grown well-paying jobs. Manufacturing employment is even lower than the Maoist era. According to ILO, urban industrial population decreased between 1990-2002 from 53,9 million to 37,3 million. Almost all urban employment growth has occurred in the service sector, cleaning, construction, domestic service, street vending, self-employment, repairs, ... that now constitute the largest category of urban employment in China.
All infrastructures created, as in colonial times, follow this uneven and destructive model in which the Chinese masses have insofar only the role of astonished spectators of the suicidal greed of multinationals and of their new sponsors with red card.
Decentralization, lax environmental and labor standards have been the incentive for the installation of industrial enclaves in the margins of large Chinese rivers. The Chinese economic boom has been a massive environmental collapse. Even the World Bank has warned of "catastrophic consequences for future generations."
China builds an average of 2 power plants a week based on coal adding energy capacity equivalent to the entire energy capacity of Britain each year. Hundreds of dams rises each year, while hundreds of new urban centers are dwindling land to water and crops (National Geographic, May 2008. p. 114).
Every year some 40,000 Chinese factories discharged million tons of untreated waste into rivers, lakes and coastal areas, a volume equivalent to the flow of the Yellow River, ruining fertile lands and decreasing exponentially drinking water resources. The Grand Canal is increasingly resembling a sewer.
In a country that did not known landfills, where almost everything was recycled , are now being installed thousands of new landfills every year that occupy about 1200 km2 of land.
All Guandong province has become a huge "multinational" landfill accepting the "business" industrial waste from other countries.
Has been mainly export which has pulled demand in China. The Chinese surplus in 2007 was already $ 378,000 million (12% of GDP). From a global perspective these surpluses have been absorbed by U.S. trade deficits (The European Union and Japan have balanced the Balance of Payments)
Coal consumption has more than doubled since 1990 (an average of two coal plants a week) and has already surpassed the U.S. in CO2 emissions. The real estate and infrastructure boom is consuming 54% of global cement production and 36% of steel.
But if the current level of investment is maintained and U.S. demand do not longer responds as until recently, this will leave China with a huge excess production capacity that the final demand of the world market can not absorb. China will experience a crisis of overproduction that will leave much of the installed capacity unused.
The monstrous buildings constructed in Beijing and other urban centers by the most famous Western architects are sure to rest empty, the factories abandoned, blast furnaces, shipyards, power plants and hydroelectric plants ... without orders and without demand, leaving a trail of millions of workers out of work and unable to return to their home areas destroyed by pollution and/or dispossessed of their water resources.
The mad capitalist rush leads protests on the rise. According to official figures the "untixing shijian" (term which includes all kinds of demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, marches, blocking traffic, making buildings, etc.) have grown from about 8,700 cases in 1993 to 32,000 in 1999, 50,000 in 2002, 58,000 in 2003, 74,000 in 2004 and 90,000 in 2005. Labor rights groups based in Hong Kong estimated 300,000 cases occurred in 2003. In December 2005 clashes between peasants and the People's Armed Police (sort of paramilitary) in the village of Dongzou, Guandong Province, caused dozens of casualties.
The reasons for the riots are varied: confiscation of land (farmers do not own the land but have contracts to use for 30 years) without compensation and resettlement in worse land , evictions, corruption, free trade unions ban (except single union official), pollution and contamination of aquifers, rivers, lakes. Acid rain, etc.
The protests achieved a tax reform in 2002 that significantly reduced the peasant tax burden making some improvements in social, education and health.
In general the response of the authorities has been to isolate, if possible, the disturbances, allowing some and suppressing others. Using paramilitary and provocative forces. Arrests of leaders "a posteriori" ... But what matters most is the tight control of information. The blackout. Control of reports and footage or photos ( the police, however, makes use of the cameras to act then against leaders) . Internet, despite enforcement efforts to control information, has become an effective means for filtering information. What the authorities fear most is the connection between the protests themselves and especially the participation of the intelligentsia (students, graduates , technicians, ... )
It has been said that the Chinese capitalist economy should be restructured in a more "sustainable" way and redirected towards domestic demand and consumption.
Podría corroborarlo la entrada en vigor en enero de 2008 de la nueva ley del Contrato de Trabajo - exigencia de contrato escrito, indemnización por despido de un mes por año trabajado, regulación de la jornada laboral y paga extra por horas extraordinarias, contribución obligatoria de un 13 al 15% del salario al fondo social y de pensiones, negociación colectiva en el marco del sindicato oficial... - . Pero se busca más el efecto propagandístico que la implementación. Si la ley se desarrolla como se han venido respetando las leyes medioambientales en China pueden estar tranquilos capitales y capitalistas al respecto.
Suppose that neoliberal globalization is not what everyday experience attests and the Chinese Communist Party will keep some of the motivations of its founders and decide that is necessary to make some concessions to the Chinese workers and peasants in order to create a market and domestic demand. Could corroborate these the entry into force in January 2008 of the new Labor Contract Law - the requirement of a written contract, severance pay of one month per year worked, regulation of working hours and extra pay for overtime, a mandatory contribution 13 to 15% of salary to the social fund and pension, collective bargaining under the official union ... - . But the party is looking over the propaganda effect of that than its real implementation. If the law is developed in the same way that has been developed the Environmental Law in China, capital and capitalism can be reassured about.
The party has no intention or has the means to impose such redistribution to transnational corporations, to the wealthy Chinese capitalists (many of them with intimate connections within the party and the government) and to the provincial and local governments which corrupt members are in partnership with decentralized mafia structures and also in partnership with foreign capitalists.
The implementation of the new labor law would imply an increase in labor costs between 15 and 20% in most industries which under current conditions would mean the closure of at least one third of the plants operating in the territory.
A Chinese Keynesian capitalism on the path of stability and growth as desired by many sponsors of the Olympic Games is a mirage likewise is a mirage too a Chinese industrial locomotive leading the capitalist world economy to another "gold age" or at least replace that hollow U.S. economy.
This is an inherent contradiction of the predatory neoliberal capitalist model based on hyper-exploitation of resources. The system needs more and more consumers to sell them the output produced for non-consumers workers, but it not find them anyware. When global capitalism drains a territory, its resources and population, it goes to another area to maintain or increase the rate of exploitation.
The problem is that there are no more green space for further expansion "capitalist way." The drift of current capitalist China, without going to the utopia of the Chinese living the "American way of life " is precipitating the ecological collapse of the planet.
China now consumes 15% of world's energy and if you keep the current growth rate will exceed U.S. energy consumption very soon. But Chinese energy consumption is obtained in 70% of coal so in seven years the Chinese coal burning for energy will be more than doubled. Nuclear power plants planned in nothing will replace the frantic pace of construction of new coal power plants.
Chinese oil consumption, if you keep the current growth path, will double in nine years . If that is so, in the next decade would exceed current U.S. consumption by 1.5 times.
With peak oil looming and the little room left to avoid climate change, is this perspective to follow in terms of capitalism?
. The 80 % of China's GDP is directly related to the export sector
. The domestic consumption has decreased from 50% of GDP in 1980 to less than 33% today.
. China has become the 2nd Asian country with more social inequalities (after Nepal) . In 2005, according to the Boston Consulting Group, China had 250,000 millionaires in dollars (excluding the value of their primary residence). The group, which represents less than 0.4% of the population own over 70% of the wealth and among them a few hundred have more than a billion dollars each and the disparity continues to increase. The 90%. The 90% of the 20,000 richest are offshoots of Chinese PC senior. Wen Jiabao, is one of the of the world 's richest prime ministers. His son is the owner of the largest private equity in China and his wife controls the Chinese jewelry business. Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the party, has a wealth estimated at more than 1,500 million while the wealth of Rongii Zhu, a former prime minister, would be around 1,000 million.
. China is the country with most Rolls Royce sold ($ 397,000/unit). LVMH, Moët, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, the world's first signature luxury products, plans to open two or three stores a year in China.
. "Orange County is a heavily guarded residential enclave north of Beijing and houses a million $ Beverly Hills style, designed by an architect from Newport Beach and decorated by Martha Stewart.
. China builds an average of two coal-fired power plants a week each year adding energy capacity equivalent to the entire capacity of Britain (National geografic, May 2008. P. 114), has 11 operating nuclear plants and plans to build more than three hundred in the coming decades.
. 1000 new cars every day in Beijing
. Oil imports : 1996, 166 million barrels; 2006, 1,065 million barrels.
. 1978, 172 million lived in cities. 2007, 577 million (40% of total). Each year 10 million are leaving the country and hundreds of industrial cities.
. Of the 660 Chinese cities, 400 are short of water (over 100 with severe shortages).
. Each year 4,000 tons of contaminated wastewater are dumped into the Yellow River. 50% The Yellow River -with is largely other assorted colors - is biologically dead and often the water runs drie in the last section going through the "cancer villages" before reaching the sea. To "remedy" it in 2007 the government approved an investment of $ 52,000 million in new chemical plants to install on its banks, north of Yinchuan (the least damaged).
. Between 1987 and 1992 half of one million Ha of agricultural land were converted to urban uses. Throughout China farmers lose their land against urban tide and often uncompensated and with repression by corrupt officials. Speculation in land on the urban periphery has become the main form of official corruption in the country.
. 350,000 people were resettled only to make way for the construction of the Olympic Stadium while for visitors and journalists do not see the abject poverty many houses were demolished forcibly relocating the residents in the periphery. Meanwhile Shanghai forced the relocation of 1.5 million people between 1991 and 1997 to make way for skyscrapers, luxury apartments and shopping centers. Beijing for the same reasons drove away 1 million during the same period.
. Investment from abroad : 50,000 million/year (2000-2005)
. The 9% of Chinese exports to the U.S. goes to Wal-Mart. A Chinese worker who makes a toy popular in USA (Thomas the Tank Engine) would have to work six months to buy it.
. Trade deficit USA/China: 6,000 million in 1985, 266,000 million in 2008.
Links:
Yiching Wu: Rethinking Capitalist Restoration in China.
Legislation in China
Visibility in Chinese cities
Tortures en China
Andy Xie: "China will overtake the U.S. as the leading power in 15 years"
"Ren, peoples building" designed by the Danish firm Plot for the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
The 6 castaways
Suppose six castaways on a desert island, five Asians and one American. They decide to share the work as follows: an Asian would be in charge of hunting, fishing another, another gathering, another of supply of firewood and other food preparation. The American will eat and take care of the rest of the day sunbathing. Asians subsist with the leftovers. Economists say that the U.S. is the only engine of economic growth of the island and that without his excellent appetite Asians would be unemployed.
Tiger Or Tamed Elephant
The pro-capitalist reforms undertaken since the death of Mao for the reintroduction of global capitalism into China have been presented as a kind of fairy tale. China would be heading rapidly towards a modern and advanced society, (such as Japanese or Korean cases) with middle-class consumers, which could even overtake the U.S. or Europe in a few decades.
The reality is more prosaic. Of course, reforms have transformed China's economy from head to toe. The state enterprise sector has declined from 100% in 1978 to less than 40% at present and its contribution to China's GDP has fallen to less than 20%. The state still controls the subsidiary sectors (petrochemical, electricity, coal and metals) but Chinese growth depends in extreme degree on exports of multinationals operating in the country. In 1990 exports accounted for 16% of GDP. In 2006 they exceeded 40%.
There has been a kind of global great division of labor. Transnational corporations have turned China into a completely oriented export economy while the state sector has specialized, meekly, to broaden the bases, supply and export infrastructures for that platform.
Asian tigers
Asia was in permanent emergency situation during the Cold War. Japan and the Asian "tigers", U.S. allies, were provided with generous financial and military aid and, especially, the opening of Western markets for their products. The economic "miracle" was linked to the fear of communist expansion. Japan specialized in high value-added production, the 4 tigers in intermediate production and aspiring tigers in labor intensive producing. It was a capitalism with a human face, unions, decent wages and middle class consumers.
Under the Asian old industrial order, each "tiger" specialized in the export of a specific group of finished products. But the system was based on an imbalance that was getting greater every year. Asia exported more than it imported. The difference was invested in U.S. treasury bonds, which allowed Reagan cut taxes and thus stimulate Western consumption. Soon Asian economies become major U.S. creditors.
But as Keynes said, if you owe a thousand dollars to a bank that's your problem but if you owe a million, is the bank who has the problem. Most Asian countries would shed some titles in encreasingly devalued dollars but they had to keep buying them if they wanted to continue exporting. So Japan and the Asian Tigers had to continue to finance the increasing twin deficits (budget and trad ) of his gigantic client.
The new Pacific model
Following the 1985 Plaza Accord, the U.S. forced a drastic revaluation of the Yen relative to the $ to fix the huge trade imbalance with Japan. The response of the Japanese capital ( the Keiretsu in collusion with the government) was to create a platform for exports in the Asian mainland. Between 1985 and 1990 more than $ 15,000 million in direct investment landed in Southeast Asia. South Korea and Taiwan would soon follow.
In this new model the old tigers offshore intensive labor processes to mainland countries with lower wages installing key in hand factories in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, ..., to assemble the components from former Asian tigers.
It was in these circumstances that the Chinese bureaucracy was incorporated into the system by offering docile cheap labor, rigidly framed, and a huge ecological space to destroy.
Since 1990, not only former Asian tiger multinationals were operatings from China but the vast majority of the planet multinationals joined the system, relocating much of its production plants to China who became the low-cost platform of export consumption production worldwide.
China for sale
The corrupt Chinese bureaucracy had much to offer to global capitalism. Three decades of Maoism (1949-1976) had put on foot a country ravaged by imperialism. China experienced rapid growth in its infrastructure that propeled the development of agriculture and industry. A mid 1970s China occupied the 6th place among the most industrialized countries and had an advanced research and development sector (since the 1950s had developed several generations of computers, often with nothing to envy to the global capitalist powers). There was not great social inequalities and educational level and health care were enviable for a population around 1,000 million.
After backing down to global capitalism Chinese leaders did not hesitate to defame Mao methods and devalue the achievements of the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to justify the need for their "reforms".
Initially the "reformists" to win the support of the Chinese masses, raised prices the state paid to farmers and promoted the equal sharing of communes between rural families, which lead to an increase in the percentage of farm income on total National Income from 30% to 44% between 1978-1984.
Having secured the reformist path, the agricultural sector was sacked in favor of the capitalist exporter sector. There was a sustained net transfer of resources from the countryside to the city (via taxes, government spending, transfers of bank deposits and loans) with the result of a rapid decline in agricultural income and a social crisis that began to expel population at an exponential rate.
The "paperless" Chinese (nongmingong)
One of the keys to the Chinese economic "miracle" has been internal migration which represents 70 % of manufacturing employment and over 80 % of employment in construction. It is estimated that between 150 and 200 million rural people have migrated to the cities. Although remaining years in the cities , they and even their children born in the city, are classified as " rural" and must pay substantial sums for their temporary urban residence "permits", permits that are not entitled to education, health, housing or state pensions. This is the Chinese equivalent for "undocumented" immigrants in Europe and North America (the cheap slavery XXI century). The peasants driven from the field are kept permanently in an irregular situation, with no rights of any kind, and in many cases, even with no contract at all , to be exploited with impunity by legions of subcontractors working for the large multinationals.
Model failures
With a low domestic demand the model performance depends on consumption in the U.S. and Europe. Japan, Korea and Taiwan export intermediate goods to China who also attracts imports from the Philippines, Malaysia and Australia. But the goods assembled by Chinese industry are almost entirely exported to U.S. and Europe.
In addition, the model is doomed to implode as it involves the progressive industrial relocation and impoverishment of Western consumers. Since the late 1990 's "globalization " just resisted with increasing doses of credit that were added in successive speculative bubbles.
With the financial collapse, the whole "global" framework created after the Plaza Accord crumbled .
The Chinese reaction against their Western customers crisis has been engaging in a hellish race to increase its industrial and export capacity ( where are they going to export?), A kind of oriental cheap credit bubble, a outrageous public investment and housing bubble Japanese style or Spanish that triggered up the prices of the planet raw materials.
Chinese locomotive?
China buys long-term USA government debt as placement of its huge trade surpluses. If China stop doing it the mountains of accumulated currency would force the rise of the exchange rate of the yuan against the dollar. So buying U.S. debt, China is subsidizing its export sector and thus the profits of multinationals operating in their territory (many of USA private property)
A common topic of business magazines is the "Chinese locomotive" . The western economic recovery would be achieved by pressing the Chinese government to implement a policy of market liberalization in order to rebalance trade with the West (raising the exchange rate of the Yuan and opening its domestic market to Western products).
The argument assumes that Chinese workers would end up earning decent wages to act as global consumers. But decent wages would sink the “competitiveness” of Chinese multinational export platform. In fact Chinese private consumption relative to GDP had fallen from 47% in 1992 to 36% in 2006 (in the U.S. is over 70%). The decline in the wage share in the overall Chinese income has been one of the worst of the world.
China has jumped on the inequality and social polarization global podium (2nd after Nepal). At present, China can boast rank second (only behind the U.S.) in terms of dollar billionaires. Yachts, private jets, super luxury sports cars, residential and exclusive clubs, big wild game, LVMH, Moët, Hennessy Louis Vuitton , ... are the only “consumer” sectors with certain prospects in China.
Labour costs in China ( in % relative to the U.S. )
The problem is that large multinational companies are not interested in this roadmap. They have designed a complex transnational network in which Asian industrial powers export parts and components to China where they are assembled and exported to the West. China has become the centerpiece of the scheme increasing its share in information technology and communication products sector from less than 3% of total world exports in 1992 to 24% in 2006.
Currently over 60% of U.S. imports from China come from the factories installed in that country by U.S. multinationals. To Western "nations ", to its unemployed workers, they should yuan appreciation but to multinationals, including U.S. , no.
The threat to industrial activity and Westerners jobs depends on the relationships between states or nations but due to the current operative transnational oligopolies that have made China the world's assembly shop . The locomotive , in any case, pull the large multinational corporations.
The penetration of global capitalism in China
Two phases can be distinguished in this process.
The small jump to global capitalism
In the 1980s Chinese per capita GDP was 14 times lower than in the USSR. Over 70% of the workforce were farmers (14% in the USSR). Chinese planning had always been much less rigid and more decentralized than Soviet. The authorities of the provinces and municipalities enjoyed a certain autonomy (that the Cultural Revolution had increased) unknown in central USSR.
After Mao's death , between 1976 and 1992 followed a series of reforms aimed, in theory, to the gradual introduction of market relations in socialism. This process proved the falsity of the alleged incompatibility between bureaucracy and capitalist market. By contrast, the prerogatives of the bureaucracy resulted not only not antagonistic with the market but perfectly compatible, coexisting and mutually reinforcing, facilitating the process of privatization and division of assets and means of production.
The grain prices were increased. Then began a phase of experimental reform in the provinces of Anhui and Sichuan in which the communes were disbanded and the use of land vested equally between farmers allowing them to grow what they wanted after completing the required supplies to the state (family responsibility system). After the generalization of this experience throughout the country, the result was a significant increase in production and farm income.
In this first phase, urban China remained dominated by the public sector but it was allowed the emergence of small familiar private companies r with the option of employing up to 7 employees as additional workforce. From 1984 market relations gradually replaced planning for resource allocation. It was allowed to public companies retain a portion of the benefits that were generally used to improve the living conditions of employees or invested in a wide collection of services related to the production unit and including apartment complexes, clinics, schools, shops, cafes, sports and leisure facilities.
Thus the dominance of large public sector units was complemented by a private marginal sector.
The de-collectivization was completed in 1984, giving way to households farmers who did not own land but obtained an assignment of it in good conditions. At the same time, given that rural industry was outside of central planning, factories in rural areas, promoted and managed by local authorities, began to be build, based mainly on the area workforce.
However, in rural areas near the "Special Economic Zones" (southwest of Guangdong and Fujian) entrepreneurs who came from Hong Kong and Taiwan developed capitalist companies although officially registered as 'collective companies'.
Thus, in the period between 1978 and 1992, except for the Special Economic Zones, the Chinese economy was divided between two sectors: a large industrial public sector and a growing private sector in which family production relations prevailed. It was still a market economy coexisting with a powerful planned sector.
The great leap into global capitalism (1992-2000)
Private capitalism is nothing new in China. Although there were capitalist enterprises before 1949, they constituted only a small part of the economy. However, between these two dates (1992-2000) the entire Chinese economy has been converted to the capitalists parameters.
After the famous " Southern Tour " of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 - " to get rich is glorious" - the Chinese Communist Party leadership officially adopted the goal of a “socialist market economy " which, in the Chinese context, meant an accelerated march towards global capitalism based on a brutal process of primitive accumulation of capital, in which public assets are systematically converted into private equity and appropriated by the capitalist bureaucratic class, using state coercion mechanisms.
In the 1990s the majority of state and collective ownership enterprises in China were privatized. Between 1996 and 2004 the number of state enterprises was reduced by 40% and 36 million state or collective workers were laid off. The proportion of urban workers in the public sector fell from 82% to 26% . Only between 2005 and 2006, six million more were redundant, Chinese officials said. The remaninig public sector workers lost their job security, health care, child care, pensions and housing and were reduced to outright workforce exploited by domestic and foreign capitalists.
The rules limiting the size of private companies and restricting foreign investment were lifted. While small Chinese entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore found local partners to set up business in the villages and towns of the mainland, Korean and Japanese multinationals and soon also the North American and European , found them in the highest level of the corrupt bureaucracy. In 2000 almost one third of Chinese industry was yet taken over by foreign capital. In 2007 more than two thirds of the industrial sector was in the hands of foreign multinationals.
"Keep the big and drop the small"
Under this slogan, China proceeded to a thorough restructuring of the remaining large public enterprises under the "corporate" standard model of the great transnational corporations . Its assets were converted into shares listed in the stock exchange. The state reserved a controlling stake in strategic sectors (banking, oil, steel, energy, telecommunications and weapons). The structure of these companies has been redesigned to respond to profit as its main goal, firing in the process more than 50 million employees.
The new “Chinese” multinationals - CNPC, CNOOC, Sinopec, SINOCHEM, , Lenovo, ... - , operate according to the unscrupulous procedures and criminal conduct codes of their Western counterparts, traded on the international stock exchanges, are involved in mergers and acquisitions and acquire strategic reserves of fossil fuels and minerals in competition with Shell, Exxon , ... in Níger, Nigeria, Angola, Congo, ect. ), hire top Western CEOs - with no record of their salaries - and bribe corrupt governments and gain sufficient weight to participate in international oligopolistic markets.
"Release the small" meant the privatization of everything else according to the Russian pattern. Small and medium-sized enterprises of urban, local or village areas, were privatized in a process of expropriation and privatization of resources at a scale and speed that has never been recorded in history (except the Russian case).
Private Capitalism need capitalist and as usual accumulation processes are murky and shameful. As in Russia, the first generation of "capitalist" is carrying out their particular "primitive accumulation of capital" based on the appropriation and systematic theft of all the country's resources. Embezzlement , commissions, kickbacks, fraud money, currency manipulation , forced land and farms expropriations, ... with the invaluable collaboration of Western industrial joint ventures, hotel chain companies, real estate, .. converted into real cheerleaders of the "communist" Chinese authorities.
In rural areas, devastated and impoverished by pollution, evictions and abuse of local authorities, the dismantling of the communes has meant the demise of health care and public education. Over one hundred million have migrated to the "special zones" and large cities, forming the world's largest army of cheap labor.
Chinese Middle Classes?
The salary of a Chinese worker accounted for 4% of that of an American in 2004 and probably was lower given the unreliability of Chinese statistics. So Chinese consumption has grown much less than its total production. The massive Chinese expansion has been fueled by investments and exports. The share of wages in China's GDP decreased from 51-52% in the 80 to less than 38% in the first years of the new millennium with the consumption share dropping from 50-52% to 36% in the same period.
But the model is far from that followed by Japan and Korea in the postwar period. There have appeared a "middle class" equivalent to those existing in developed countries. Chinese capitalism, such as Russian, has been reborn with a huge and growing social polarization degree. What for the Russian new capitalism has meant the exploitation of oil and raw materials, for the Chinese has been the exploitation of the masses of impoverished migrant peasants put at the service of the great transnational corporations.
Between the kleptocrats millionaires and the workers has developed only a thin social layer mainly composed by foremen, labor traffickers, corrupt officials, gangsters and mobsters, small businessmen (already threatened by Wal Mart and other chains of supermarkets) and professionals or technicians. In total they would not reach 70 million thanks to the merciless exploitation of 200 million workers and ecological destruction across the country, with the rest 1,000 million sinking in misery.
The Chinese Communist Party has turn into a kleptocratic mafia, Russian style, with the particularity of a " more orderly "transition” and maintaining a dictatorial state structure with the function to faciliate the largest capitalist exploitation of planet labor to the benefit of the transnational corporations.
The children and grandchildren of PCC leaders occupy the majority ( between 85 and 90% ) of senior executive positions in the areas of finance and insurance, export, real estate and engineering. A third of the 800 richest Chinese (2007) are members of the CCP, 38 of whom are delegates of the National People's Congres . The rest have family connections with party members or officials.
The capitalist restructuring of the Chinese bureaucracy has been done under the direction of the transnational corporations which in exchange for premiums, some shares deliveries and bribery, have framed an army of cheap and docile labor, and acquired a whole continent to steal its resources, exploit, deplete and destroy.
The fallacy of income growth
Defenders of the system say the huge growth has resulted in substantial increases in income, even for the most disadvantaged.
Although official statistics manufacturing wages doubled between 2002 and 2008 (from $2/h to 4$/h), the fact is that the percentage of wages to GDP has steadily decreased throughout the period ( 56,5 % in 1983, 53% in 1992, 36.7% in 2005) while the corporate profits have steadily climbed.
The deceptive "per capita income" index may indicate that urban residents enjoy lucky incomes well above those of the previous decade. But rent comparisons conceal income loss in previously subsidized goods and services as housing, transportation , food, energy, health and education . The annual income of the limited group of Highest paid cadres and professional of the 1980s was no more than 1,400 yuan on average and yet they lived under conditions similar to the Western middle classes. In 2006 , the average annual income of most urban exceed 3,800 yuan, however they live in damaged apartments, unable to afford to see a doctor and having trouble making ends meet.
It is also false that have grown well-paying jobs. Manufacturing employment is even lower than the Maoist era. According to ILO, urban industrial population decreased between 1990-2002 from 53,9 million to 37,3 million. Almost all urban employment growth has occurred in the service sector, cleaning, construction, domestic service, street vending, self-employment, repairs, ... that now constitute the largest category of urban employment in China.
The Chinese "multinational" landfill
All infrastructures created, as in colonial times, follow this uneven and destructive model in which the Chinese masses have insofar only the role of astonished spectators of the suicidal greed of multinationals and of their new sponsors with red card.
Decentralization, lax environmental and labor standards have been the incentive for the installation of industrial enclaves in the margins of large Chinese rivers. The Chinese economic boom has been a massive environmental collapse. Even the World Bank has warned of "catastrophic consequences for future generations."
China builds an average of 2 power plants a week based on coal adding energy capacity equivalent to the entire energy capacity of Britain each year. Hundreds of dams rises each year, while hundreds of new urban centers are dwindling land to water and crops (National Geographic, May 2008. p. 114).
Every year some 40,000 Chinese factories discharged million tons of untreated waste into rivers, lakes and coastal areas, a volume equivalent to the flow of the Yellow River, ruining fertile lands and decreasing exponentially drinking water resources. The Grand Canal is increasingly resembling a sewer.
In a country that did not known landfills, where almost everything was recycled , are now being installed thousands of new landfills every year that occupy about 1200 km2 of land.
All Guandong province has become a huge "multinational" landfill accepting the "business" industrial waste from other countries.
Overcapacity Crisis
Has been mainly export which has pulled demand in China. The Chinese surplus in 2007 was already $ 378,000 million (12% of GDP). From a global perspective these surpluses have been absorbed by U.S. trade deficits (The European Union and Japan have balanced the Balance of Payments)
Coal consumption has more than doubled since 1990 (an average of two coal plants a week) and has already surpassed the U.S. in CO2 emissions. The real estate and infrastructure boom is consuming 54% of global cement production and 36% of steel.
But if the current level of investment is maintained and U.S. demand do not longer responds as until recently, this will leave China with a huge excess production capacity that the final demand of the world market can not absorb. China will experience a crisis of overproduction that will leave much of the installed capacity unused.
The monstrous buildings constructed in Beijing and other urban centers by the most famous Western architects are sure to rest empty, the factories abandoned, blast furnaces, shipyards, power plants and hydroelectric plants ... without orders and without demand, leaving a trail of millions of workers out of work and unable to return to their home areas destroyed by pollution and/or dispossessed of their water resources.
Demonstrations and protests
The mad capitalist rush leads protests on the rise. According to official figures the "untixing shijian" (term which includes all kinds of demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, marches, blocking traffic, making buildings, etc.) have grown from about 8,700 cases in 1993 to 32,000 in 1999, 50,000 in 2002, 58,000 in 2003, 74,000 in 2004 and 90,000 in 2005. Labor rights groups based in Hong Kong estimated 300,000 cases occurred in 2003. In December 2005 clashes between peasants and the People's Armed Police (sort of paramilitary) in the village of Dongzou, Guandong Province, caused dozens of casualties.
The reasons for the riots are varied: confiscation of land (farmers do not own the land but have contracts to use for 30 years) without compensation and resettlement in worse land , evictions, corruption, free trade unions ban (except single union official), pollution and contamination of aquifers, rivers, lakes. Acid rain, etc.
The protests achieved a tax reform in 2002 that significantly reduced the peasant tax burden making some improvements in social, education and health.
In general the response of the authorities has been to isolate, if possible, the disturbances, allowing some and suppressing others. Using paramilitary and provocative forces. Arrests of leaders "a posteriori" ... But what matters most is the tight control of information. The blackout. Control of reports and footage or photos ( the police, however, makes use of the cameras to act then against leaders) . Internet, despite enforcement efforts to control information, has become an effective means for filtering information. What the authorities fear most is the connection between the protests themselves and especially the participation of the intelligentsia (students, graduates , technicians, ... )
Keynesian Capitalism in China?
It has been said that the Chinese capitalist economy should be restructured in a more "sustainable" way and redirected towards domestic demand and consumption.
Podría corroborarlo la entrada en vigor en enero de 2008 de la nueva ley del Contrato de Trabajo - exigencia de contrato escrito, indemnización por despido de un mes por año trabajado, regulación de la jornada laboral y paga extra por horas extraordinarias, contribución obligatoria de un 13 al 15% del salario al fondo social y de pensiones, negociación colectiva en el marco del sindicato oficial... - . Pero se busca más el efecto propagandístico que la implementación. Si la ley se desarrolla como se han venido respetando las leyes medioambientales en China pueden estar tranquilos capitales y capitalistas al respecto.
Suppose that neoliberal globalization is not what everyday experience attests and the Chinese Communist Party will keep some of the motivations of its founders and decide that is necessary to make some concessions to the Chinese workers and peasants in order to create a market and domestic demand. Could corroborate these the entry into force in January 2008 of the new Labor Contract Law - the requirement of a written contract, severance pay of one month per year worked, regulation of working hours and extra pay for overtime, a mandatory contribution 13 to 15% of salary to the social fund and pension, collective bargaining under the official union ... - . But the party is looking over the propaganda effect of that than its real implementation. If the law is developed in the same way that has been developed the Environmental Law in China, capital and capitalism can be reassured about.
The party has no intention or has the means to impose such redistribution to transnational corporations, to the wealthy Chinese capitalists (many of them with intimate connections within the party and the government) and to the provincial and local governments which corrupt members are in partnership with decentralized mafia structures and also in partnership with foreign capitalists.
The implementation of the new labor law would imply an increase in labor costs between 15 and 20% in most industries which under current conditions would mean the closure of at least one third of the plants operating in the territory.
A Chinese Keynesian capitalism on the path of stability and growth as desired by many sponsors of the Olympic Games is a mirage likewise is a mirage too a Chinese industrial locomotive leading the capitalist world economy to another "gold age" or at least replace that hollow U.S. economy.
This is an inherent contradiction of the predatory neoliberal capitalist model based on hyper-exploitation of resources. The system needs more and more consumers to sell them the output produced for non-consumers workers, but it not find them anyware. When global capitalism drains a territory, its resources and population, it goes to another area to maintain or increase the rate of exploitation.
The problem is that there are no more green space for further expansion "capitalist way." The drift of current capitalist China, without going to the utopia of the Chinese living the "American way of life " is precipitating the ecological collapse of the planet.
China now consumes 15% of world's energy and if you keep the current growth rate will exceed U.S. energy consumption very soon. But Chinese energy consumption is obtained in 70% of coal so in seven years the Chinese coal burning for energy will be more than doubled. Nuclear power plants planned in nothing will replace the frantic pace of construction of new coal power plants.
Chinese oil consumption, if you keep the current growth path, will double in nine years . If that is so, in the next decade would exceed current U.S. consumption by 1.5 times.
With peak oil looming and the little room left to avoid climate change, is this perspective to follow in terms of capitalism?
Figures
. The 80 % of China's GDP is directly related to the export sector
. The domestic consumption has decreased from 50% of GDP in 1980 to less than 33% today.
. China has become the 2nd Asian country with more social inequalities (after Nepal) . In 2005, according to the Boston Consulting Group, China had 250,000 millionaires in dollars (excluding the value of their primary residence). The group, which represents less than 0.4% of the population own over 70% of the wealth and among them a few hundred have more than a billion dollars each and the disparity continues to increase. The 90%. The 90% of the 20,000 richest are offshoots of Chinese PC senior. Wen Jiabao, is one of the of the world 's richest prime ministers. His son is the owner of the largest private equity in China and his wife controls the Chinese jewelry business. Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the party, has a wealth estimated at more than 1,500 million while the wealth of Rongii Zhu, a former prime minister, would be around 1,000 million.
. China is the country with most Rolls Royce sold ($ 397,000/unit). LVMH, Moët, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, the world's first signature luxury products, plans to open two or three stores a year in China.
. "Orange County is a heavily guarded residential enclave north of Beijing and houses a million $ Beverly Hills style, designed by an architect from Newport Beach and decorated by Martha Stewart.
. China builds an average of two coal-fired power plants a week each year adding energy capacity equivalent to the entire capacity of Britain (National geografic, May 2008. P. 114), has 11 operating nuclear plants and plans to build more than three hundred in the coming decades.
. 1000 new cars every day in Beijing
. Oil imports : 1996, 166 million barrels; 2006, 1,065 million barrels.
. 1978, 172 million lived in cities. 2007, 577 million (40% of total). Each year 10 million are leaving the country and hundreds of industrial cities.
. Of the 660 Chinese cities, 400 are short of water (over 100 with severe shortages).
. Each year 4,000 tons of contaminated wastewater are dumped into the Yellow River. 50% The Yellow River -with is largely other assorted colors - is biologically dead and often the water runs drie in the last section going through the "cancer villages" before reaching the sea. To "remedy" it in 2007 the government approved an investment of $ 52,000 million in new chemical plants to install on its banks, north of Yinchuan (the least damaged).
. Between 1987 and 1992 half of one million Ha of agricultural land were converted to urban uses. Throughout China farmers lose their land against urban tide and often uncompensated and with repression by corrupt officials. Speculation in land on the urban periphery has become the main form of official corruption in the country.
. 350,000 people were resettled only to make way for the construction of the Olympic Stadium while for visitors and journalists do not see the abject poverty many houses were demolished forcibly relocating the residents in the periphery. Meanwhile Shanghai forced the relocation of 1.5 million people between 1991 and 1997 to make way for skyscrapers, luxury apartments and shopping centers. Beijing for the same reasons drove away 1 million during the same period.
. Investment from abroad : 50,000 million/year (2000-2005)
. The 9% of Chinese exports to the U.S. goes to Wal-Mart. A Chinese worker who makes a toy popular in USA (Thomas the Tank Engine) would have to work six months to buy it.
. Trade deficit USA/China: 6,000 million in 1985, 266,000 million in 2008.
Links:
Yiching Wu: Rethinking Capitalist Restoration in China.
Legislation in China
Visibility in Chinese cities
Tortures en China
Andy Xie: "China will overtake the U.S. as the leading power in 15 years"
