Sunday, January 05, 2003

Dickensian China My wife and I watched the movie Beijing Bicycle the other night. She really disliked  it.  I found the movie somewhat short on storyline and character, but fascinating as a glimpse of China.   This Christmas we scoured our basement and some used book stores to give each of our three children some of the more gripping political books we had read when we were younger.   The two volumes we gave each of them were Fanshen by William Hinton, and the Prophet Armed by Isaac Deutscher.    Fanshen really colored my view of China.  I think with all the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, most forget just how important Mao was to the feudal Chinese countryside.  My memory of Fanshen was how hard it was, and how brave the people were, who came together to cast out the feudal ways with the help of communist cadres.  The overwhelming sense was of acting for the common good—and although class struggle was everywhere, the goal was radical equality, which meant overcoming thousands of years of indoctrination about status, power, and who had rights to live.   In Beijing Bicycle, all the class tensions of Capitalist china are on display as a country boy comes to Beijing, gets a job as a bicycle messenger, and then has his bike stolen.  Watching the movie is like watching something from Dickens.  Every person is for themselves in a cut throat competition of people just a step above disaster.  Families in the movie work constantly—even doing electronic piece work at home to earn a few extra yuan.    Yet in the midst of this grinding work, more and more people are becoming rich—buying cars, living in hotels, etc.   The dynamism of Beijing was unmistakable.   I have written before about China becoming the manufacturing base of the world.  With such a ferocious emphasis on education and competition, China is rapidly becoming an economic superpower that will eventually rival the U.S. and Europe.   So long as the U.S. thinks in terms of military power and control, it will be fighting the last war.  While we spend billions on armaments, the Chinese spend billions on education, manufacturing infrastructure, and modernization.  The result is that their productivity grows faster than ours—eventually confronting us with an equally strong partner/competitor.    The problem with a military domination strategy is that all the weapons in the world will do you no good if you cannot use them.  Just as mutually assured destruction  in the cold war ultimately prevented first Eisenhower and then Nixon from using nuclear weapons, so the economic consequences of war between economic superpowers  will probably be too great a price to pay for there to be such a war.    Our lives would be safer, more secure, and more satisfying without the burden of our imperial ambitions.  Instead of $200 billion for war with Iraq, and trillions for missile defense, we could develop post-petroleum decentralized economies that could sustainably create wealth for generations.     With our myopic leaders, China is much more likely to accomplish this revolution than us, and we will all eventually be the poorer having squandered our wealth on a rusting, obsolete military. 9:52:02 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 2/2/2003; 5:54:53 PM.