September 10, 2007
MY ROLE as media bottom-feeder takes me to the sort of conferences where few other foreign journalists would dare to tread, and while this is normally a tedious and soul-destroying activity, listening to a variety of middle-level bureaucrats recite everything they can remember about the last visit from the state leadership, it at least brings me into contact with Professor Liu Ji, a haughty, patrician who serves as the head of the State Council's National Sentiment Survey and Research Centre and looked a little bit like Ronnie Corbett.
Why does the United States always go on about China and the threat it poses, and the human rights it abuses? Professor Liu had a simple answer, devised - he said - while boozing it up with some American colleagues:
The United States is in the western hemisphere and China is in the eastern hemisphere. The United States' day is China's night. When the United States looks at China, it sees only the darkness.
We are all now talking about China's historical role and despite the almost ecstatic predictions of China's demise that continue to infiltrate the foreign press, most experts are discussing not so much the possibility that China will become the strongest economy on the planet, but the way the country - from a position of strength - will fit in with the aims and aspirations of the international community.
Hence, we hear about an alternative model of growth that China is offering to regions like Africa, based on an opposition to the stringently monetarist Washington Consensus and an indifference to ideas like democracy of freedom.
When talking about the threat that China is supposed to pose to the old behemoths of the western world, Chinese officials are apt to suggest that there is nothing really new in China's attempts to grow. China's various social challenges, said Professor Liu, are quite typical of all countries in which per capita GDP levels linger at around the $1,000-3,000 level, and over the next 20-30 years, it needs to address the problems of the peasantry as it attempts to bring per capita incomes up to the level of the economies of Europe. Meanwhile, once the levels of prosperity increase, some of China's natural advantages - including cheap surplus land and labour - are likely to disappear.
He said that China's cities were already like Europe. The problem was, he said, that the countryside was still Africa. Running through his soundbites, he also said that while the US had an agricultural industry but no peasants, China had peasants but no agricultural industry.
He predicted that by 2035, China's aggregate economic value would be equal to the United States, which no longer seems like the sort of idle prediction that it used to be during the heady days of the Great Leap Forward, when Chairman Mao was advocating a series of shabby patched-up short-cuts that could - he thought - be sustained by sheer revolutionary zeal.
As for the idea of inevitable conflict between China and the US, discussed on a previous occasion, the United States needs China, Liu said. Every possible hotspot facing the US government at the moment lies on the frontiers of China, be it Afghanistan or Russia, North Korea or Pakistan. The two remaining members of the axis of evil, Iran and North Korea, are also dependent on China, Liu said.
There are doubters. In the sterile, Swiss atmosphere of the Davos forum in Dalian at the end of last week, the languid Professor Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute provided a welcome break from the self-congratulatory bromides and MBA-inspired platitudes that gushed from the majority of attending businesspeople and government officials.
Much to the shocked silence of the audience, Eberstadt suggested that the implications of China's One Child Policy were about to lay waste to a great deal of the progress that the country has made in the last few years. He talked about the imminent evaporation of social capital, which was typically dependent on the sort of extended family that - thanks to the government's birth control measures - no longer exists.
There will, as everyone knows, be an explosion in the number of senior citizens, as there will be in the developed economies of Europe and Japan, but as yet, there is no social security system capable of caring for them in their old age, and the traditional eastern methods will not work because for the most part, four grandparents and two parents could be dependent on the earning power of only one grandchild.
