Gloom that booms

Those obsessed with the ghost of China can’t accept that this hyper-growth is jobless, an ecological holocaust, brutalising thousands forcibly displaced by gigantic projects

Vikram Bedi Delhi

A spectre is haunting (not just) Indian nationalists so desperately keen on ‘development’: the ghost of a ‘China’ determinedly led by the communists, via miracle growth-levels, back to a position of global pre-eminence. There is, in India, a mixture of embarrassment, envy and fear that is increasingly encouraged and mobilised by Indian propagandists of growth-centric ‘development’ and economics.

Not being an ‘expert’ on either development or China, I felt incited to find out more, to do some research in order to get a better, less enchanted sense of what is happening in China and, ostensibly, not happening here. Surely, one suspected, this propagandist ghost of China was at some variance to its reality; surely, this was an example of the romance of development unleashed with such relentless intensity.

I discovered that Chinese hyper-growth has in recent years become almost ‘jobless’, that it is responsible for what is nothing less than an ecological holocaust, that it is brutal in its treatment of migrant workers as well as of those being peremptorily displaced by the gigantic projects that are so popular among Chinese political elites. It is also producing regional and class inequality at a rate that has already made China into one of the most iniquitous countries anywhere.

It has been doing a poor job of welfare-state activities. Instead it’s diverting its buoyant State funds to the armed forces, the teetering public sector (especially banks) and to the gratuitous provision of over-supplied and heavily subsidised physical infrastructure for firms and the urban upper-and middle-classes. The rule of law is weak while contacts, connections and informal networking, often corrupt, are too important. All this goes on without open, pluralistic public arguments about the costs and benefits, about who wins and loses in this breakneck economic growth.

Amid all the talk of the Chinese excellence at labour and intensive manufacturing, it is never mentioned that on an average China produces only around half as many jobs per percentage point of GDP growth as India. It is only now beginning to be recognised that the Chinese ‘model’ is deliberately hostile to domestic entrepreneurship which is why it is so over-dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI) from the Chinese diaspora, Japan, and the US.

Those advocating China as a model of an ambitiously muscular nation-state omit to mention the near-truth that it is a client state of the US, dependent on American hyper-consumer markets and having its monetary policy pretty much decided by the US federal reserve. If mention is made, finally, of the perverse effect of the one-child policy on the country’s sex-ratio, and of the frailties and handicaps of the Chinese regime domestically, that it is a good deal less coherent than is normally averred in India, the truth of the real thing begins to appear. This is at considerable variance from the ‘China’ offered up by Indian development propagandists.

‘China’ is, above all, a rhetoric deployed by the Communist Party of China. This is intended to shore up support by making a certain type of ‘development’ the cardinal guiding principle of the Chinese nation’s will to regain its former grandeur, strength and eminence. Hence the enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics, or the obsession with its booming mega-cities: glass office tower-blocks, high-rise condominiums; avid mimicries of the latest architectural and urban design fads of the West.