China's once-in-a-decade leadership transition will have major
implications for China's neighbors in Southeast Asia. Given this, it might be
worthwhile to review the changing understanding of the momentous developments
in China on the part of people in our region, using my generation - the
so-called "baby boomers" - as an example.
Many in my generation in
Southeast Asia came of age during the tempestuous years of the Mao era, when
China was seeking to assert itself as a revolutionary beacon and undergoing the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Many were radicalized by the twin forces
of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation against the United States
and China's bid for revolutionary leadership in the third world.
Mao and Southeast Asian youth
Throughout Southeast Asia in the
1960s, young radicals gravitated away from the established pro-Soviet communist
parties that had been dominant for four decades and went on to form new
communist parties based on the Chinese model. In the Philippines, the Communist
Party was reestablished in December 1968 and the New People's Army was founded
in March 1969. The Chinese imprint was very visible: the basic military
strategy was to surround cities from the countryside in a "protracted
people's war" relying on the peasantry as the main force of the
revolution, not the urban working class.
Many in my generation were more
attracted to this vision of armed revolution than the parliamentary struggle
that was then regarded as the trademark of the pro-Soviet communist parties. I
would say, however, that what led some of us to join the organized left in the
early 1970s was not so much its revolutionary promise as the fact that it was
the only force that seemed capable of resisting the Marcos dictatorship that
was foisted on the country in 1972.
China's break with the rapid
industrialization model espoused by the Soviet Union struck a resonant chord
among intellectuals in countries where more than two thirds of the work force
was in the countryside and the massive amount of capital needed for a
large-scale rapid industrialization program was simply not available. Yet nor
was their any appetite for countryside-led development based on the commune
system. It was the Chinese model of armed revolution that attracted so many of
us, not China as a model of development.
Deng and the countryside
The twists and turns of Chinese
domestic politics in the 1970s and '80s, along with the crisis of socialism,
led many of us to become cooler about China, even as the political limitations,
economic illusions, and ethical flaws of Maoist and Leninist approaches became
apparent to us in our efforts at social transformation. Many activists left the
traditional organized left in the late 1980s, concerned about development with
equity and sovereignty even as they saw classical Marxism-Leninism as
anachronistic. It is from this perspective that I developed my stance towards
Deng Hsiao Ping's policies in the 1980s and '90s. This process was probably
less a theoretical than a subliminal one, as is usually the case.
I was cautiously optimistic about
the introduction of more market forces into the countryside, which allowed farmers
to significantly raise their income. Under the "Household Responsibility
Contract System", each household was given a piece of land to farm. The
household was allowed to retain what was left of what it produced after selling
a fixed proportion to the state, or simply paying a tax. The rest it could
consume or sell on the market.
I distinctly remember reading an
article about Deng's rural reforms in the Washington Post in 1982, and while it
challenged my cautious views on market reform, I felt this was the way for
China to go if the conditions of life for the country's masses of peasants were
to improve after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, looking back, my
instinctive reactions were justified. Between 1978 and 1984, rural poverty, according
to official estimates, declined from 33% to 11% of the population. Put another
way, the number of poor people declined from 260 million to 89 million in a
matter of six years.
Export-oriented industrialization
However, I was less enamored with
the policy shift towards export-oriented industrialization that occurred in
1984, which portended that China's rapid modernization would be carried out on
the backs of peasants and workers. For China's neighbors, such export-led
industrialization had led to a decline in rural income growth, a deterioration
of agriculture, and repressive working conditions. My 1990 book, Dragons in
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis, documented this underside of
rapid development in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
Indeed, in China, peasant income
- which had grown by 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984 - dropped by 2.8% a year
from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early part of the 1990s, but
stagnation of rural income marked the latter part of the decade. In contrast,
urban income, already higher than that of the peasants in the mid-1980s, was on
average six times the income of peasants by 2000.
Nevertheless, one could not but
be impressed by the boldness of Deng's reforms: the building of massive export-processing
zones, the invitation to foreign capital, the loosening of restrictions on
domestic entrepreneurs, the tying of China's future to the export markets of
Europe and the United States. There was nothing new about these thrusts. Taiwan
and South Korea had adopted them in the mid-sixties, some twenty years earlier.
It was the scale and speed with which the reorientation was done that was
impressive in the case of China.
There was also the sense that
China could tie its future to the Western markets and Western capital while
still preserving its autonomy because it had carried out something that few
other developing countries had been able to do: successfully carry out a national
revolution to create a strong state that could bargain on equal terms with
global capital and a hegemon like the United States. Most other developing
countries, unlike China, were very susceptible to global capital and to
domination by the premier state of the global capitalist system.
China at 63
Nearly 30 years since its
decisive move toward foreign-capital-led, export-oriented industrialization,
China's success is being undermined by a multisided ecological, equity, and
governance crisis.
Citizen participation in
governance is minimal, with the Communist Party continuing to monopolize
political decision-making (though it must be acknowledged that village-level
elections that involve some degree of free choice have been introduced).
China's environmental crisis is
now global in scope. China is now the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse
gases, accounting for some 29% of total emissions in 2011, up by 9% from 2010.
Inequality has worsened. With its
gini-coefficient - a measure if inequality - rising to 0.47 in 2010, China is
now a more unequal society than the United States, a far cry from the
egalitarian society that the revolution was supposed to bring to China. A
recent New York Times article on the economic activities of Prime Minister Wen
Jiabao's relatives revealed how the families of the high officials of the
Communist Party of China have been able to corner much of the wealth created by
the policies of the last few years.
Moreover, the model of foreign
capital-dependent, export-oriented industrialization is now at the center of
debate in the party and government.
In 2008, in response to the
deepening economic crisis in its main markets, the United States and Europe,
China launched a $585-billion stimulus program to enable the domestic market to
make up for the loss of export demand. This has had fleeting success, however.
China's growth rate in the first half of 2012 declined to 7.8%, its slowest
pace in three years. The main reason appeared to be its continuing dependence
on Northern markets and its inability to institutionalize domestic demand as
the key engine of the economy.
China's failure to break with
export-led growth, rather than merely a case of structural dependency,
reflected a set of interests from the reform period that, as the respected
technocrat Yu Yong Ding put it, "have morphed into vested interests, which
are fighting hard to protect what they have". The export lobby, which
brings together private entrepreneurs, state enterprise managers, foreign investors,
and government technocrats, remains the strongest lobby in Beijing.
Indeed, according to Yu, China's
"growth pattern has now almost exhausted its potential". China, the
economy that most successfully rode the globalization wave, "has reached a
crucial juncture: without painful structural adjustments, the momentum of its
economic growth could suddenly be lost. China's rapid growth has been achieved
at an extremely high cost. Only future generations will know the true
price."
When I was in Vietnam last year,
some people in the government there asked me if I thought that China had
entered a new phase in its development - whether it had transitioned from
Deng's preferred posture of keeping a low profile internationally while
focusing on economic development to one where it was now striving for regional
hegemony. Was China, the Vietnamese asked me, turning from an inward-looking
country focused on modernization into an outward-oriented power seeking
regional hegemony?
The question was, of course,
related to the inexplicable claim China was making to the whole South China
Sea, or what Vietnamese call the East Sea and Filipinos now call the West
Philippine Sea. The Chinese "nine-dash-line" claim has become
extremely destabilizing, not only because it so brazenly violates the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas that recognizes for each country a
200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), but also because it would subject to
Chinese domestic jurisdiction one of the world's most active international
waterways.
Moreover, it has provided the
United States an opportunity to reinsert itself aggressively into the region,
converting a territorial dispute that could be resolved through multilateral
diplomacy - if China would only allow that - into a superpower confrontation.
Challenges to the new leadership
For all these reasons, the
leadership transition that is currently taking place in Beijing is of interest
not only to the Chinese but to the whole world. The questions that are now
uppermost in the minds of many include the following:
Will the new Chinese government
headed by incoming President Xi Jin Ping definitively move to a new economic
paradigm that would put an emphasis on income redistribution and be more
ecologically friendly?
Will the new leadership institutionalize
new ways to address the grievances of peasants and migrant workers and make
them genuine stakeholders in the Chinese miracle?
Will China's new leaders move
towards promoting more citizen participation in governance and make a major
effort to root out the now pervasive corruption that is a serious threat to
their legitimacy?
Will the new leadership become
more flexible in global negotiations on climate change, so that in the coming
United Nations Climate Conference in Doha, Qatar, it will declare itself - as
the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases - open to accepting mandatory
cuts in its emissions?
Will the new leadership move away
from confrontation and declare itself open to multilateral negotiations to
resolve the territorial disputes with Southeast Asian countries in the South
China Sea?
A second chance?
There was a time during the early
1990s, before the Asian financial crisis, when the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN) was still influential and China still placed a great deal
of emphasis on good relations with its neighbors, that many of us felt that a
new era was dawning in the region, a time when countries could finally develop
the mature relations that had been stunted by decades of Cold War. Finally, I
felt, developments were eroding the rationale that the United States presented
for its military presence in the region: that it was the guarantor of peace and
stability in the region.
That maturation of Asian
relations did not come about. The Asian financial crisis, unfortunately, eroded
the prestige of ASEAN and the effectiveness of the once promising ASEAN
Regional Forum as an institution for the discussion and resolution of regional
security issues, while China and the United States went on to develop their own
special relationship that has oscillated from complementary to adversarial.
There is still time to move away
from the course of confrontation that threatens the region with America's
reckless "Pivot to Asia", but it will take a really bold effort on
the part of ASEAN leaders and the new Chinese leadership to reach out to each
other. Given the propensity of history to spring surprises on us, I would not
preclude such a development.
Walden Bello
Walden Bello is a member of the
House of Representatives of the Philippines representing the Akbayan (Citizens'
Action) Party. This column is adapted from a speech he gave at the China
Institute at the University of Alberta on October 24, 2012.
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd (SBC), Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. Since we are currently changing the platform of www.yourvietnamexpert.com, if any request, please, contact directly Dr Christian SIODMAK, business strategist, owner and CEO of SBC at christian.siodmak@gmail.com. Many thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment