When the world is on your shoulder, gotta straighten up your act and boogie down
Despite its reputation, Beijing’s autocracy is anything but absolute. The government long ago abandoned real communist ideology, and its current leader, Hu Jintao, a cipher with a background as a rural bureaucrat, has about as much revolutionary charisma as Bob Dole. And while China’s security apparatus is sophisticated, the country is too large, with too many educated, Internet-savvy people, for Beijing to brainwash its citizens the way Kim Jong-il has in North Korea. Most urban Chinese I’ve met are knowledgeable about their leaders’ strengths and flaws, and certainly don’t see them as some kind of gods, the way Mao was viewed in the 1950s and 1960s.
So, since the late 1970s, when China’s leaders began opening its economy, they have placed their bets on their ability to deliver continued economic growth. (…) For the most part, their gamble succeeded. For three decades, China has posted annual growth rates of over 10 percent, and this nominally communist country now seems more capitalist than Wall Street. Even in small provincial cities like Lanzhou, where I visited last year, massive malls, open-air markets, and new skyscrapers dot the downtown. (…)
Since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s urban middle classes have bought into this growth–and the regime.
Exports constitute nearly 40 percent of China’s GDP–far too high a figure. (By comparison, in the U.S., exports account for about 10 percent of GDP most years.) And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China’s Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008. Gordon Chang, a leading China analyst, estimates that 20,000 more will shutter by the end of this year. In the third quarter of 2008, Beijing also reported its fifth consecutive quarterly drop in growth, and several private research firms expect a sharper slowdown next year. Additionally, unemployment is skyrocketing; in Wenzhou, one of the main exporting cities, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs, Reuters recently reported.
{ How the global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government | The New Republic | Continue reading | Previously: Geopolitics of China }
