S.P. Seth
Daily Times
April 1, 2015
China’s cities, like Beijing, are blanketed with smog and one often sees people wearing masks to minimise its health dangers.
That there are problems with China’s rapid economic growth has been known for some years. After double-digit growth rates over many years in the past, China is now settling for single-digit growth. Last year, it was 7.4 percent, said to be the slowest in more than two decades. This year, as announced by Premier Li Keqiang, it would be “about seven percent”, half a percent down from last year’s aspiration of “about 7.5 percent” and a “new normal” for the Chinese economy. Speaking at the annual session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), Li was quite candid about the problems facing China’s economy, even though its growth rate still remains the envy of many countries. In his annual report card, he said, “With downward pressure on China’s economy building and deep-seated problems in development surfacing, the difficulties we are to encounter in the years[s] ahead may be more formidable than those of last year.”
After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and the end of the Great Cultural Revolution, which turned China upside down during the 1960s and into the 1970s, China was set on a high growth trajectory during the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping as China’s new helmsman. Despite the great convulsion of the student-led democracy movement of 1989, put down by the army, Deng managed to keep the ship of the state on an even keel committed to keeping the economy growing and to transform China into a strong country. In the process, he was prepared to discard communist ideology to favour capitalist growth but under the tight political control of the Communist Party of China (CPC). And he did not mind if this made some people rich and increased the rich-poor gap. It also greatly widened the gap between coastal regions as the favoured development zones and the interior of the country, as well as between urban and rural areas. Everything else was subordinated to the economic growth index.
In the process, over the years, such high-speed industrial development led to all sorts of problems. The growth of urban industrial centres encouraged developers and their party backers to virtually expropriate rural lands on the outskirts of overlapping boundaries, with nominal or very little compensation, causing social tensions. Of course, such developments led to a tremendous boom in real estate prices, making developers very rich and contributing to a bubble/bust situation. So much so that some of these apartments and estates have no buyers because of their high price tags.
Another serious problem from such high-speed development has been the plague of corruption from the highest to lowest levels of the party and bureaucracy. President Xi Jinping has made the eradication of corruption his crusade and some high rollers in the party have become its victims. It sometimes looks like a political purge and is causing some fear in the party ranks and among associated people, like relatives and cronies occupying cosy and powerful positions in state monopolies. It is also said to extend to the military. However, the high-pitched anti-corruption drive seems to go down well with people who have been sick of the ‘everything goes’ mantra in the system. Talking of corruption, Premier Li said in his NPC report, “Shocking cases of corruption still exist. Some government officials are neglectful of their duties, holding on to their jobs while failing to fulfil their responsibilities.”
As China’s pollution levels have been rising, the environment has emerged as an important public policy and health issue. Premier Li duly touched on this in his report when he told the NPC delegates: “Environmental pollution is a blight on the people’s quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts.” China’s cities, like Beijing, are blanketed with smog and one often sees people wearing masks to minimise its health dangers. China’s acute environmental problem is largely due to the overriding primacy of development over other considerations and failure to devise a comprehensive integrated national policy factoring in other factors. But China is not the only culprit in this regard. It has been, like other developing countries, a late starter in economic development when enough damage has already been done to the environment due to industrial development in, what are now called, developed countries.
But there are indications that China is now taking environmental pollution seriously. A recent joint announcement with the US on addressing climate change suggested that China’s carbon emissions should peak by 2030, starting a downward process from then on. It will increasingly reduce the use of fossil fuels like coal, cut energy intensity, expand trials for trading in carbon emissions, use non-fossil fuels like solar power and further expand its nuclear energy sector. Environmental pollution is of great public concern. A documentary on the subject, Under the Dome, on China’s catastrophic smog went viral on the internet recently and was viewed by many millions before it was ordered to be removed for fear of “hyping” up people’s concerns. Indeed, before it was ordered to be withdrawn, the documentary won praise from China’s new environment minister, Chen Jining. He also said that China faced an “unprecedented conflict between development and the environment”. Despite internet censoring of the documentary, President XI appears serious on the issue of climate change. He reportedly said the other day that China would punish “with an iron hand any violators who destroy the ecology or environment, with no exceptions.” How successful and how soon the environment will become an important determinant of China’s overall development priority remains to be seen.
An important element of China’s modernisation and building of a strong country has been, and is, an emphasis on modernising and expanding its defence forces. China is seared by historical memory of its humiliation at the hands of, first, the west and then Japan. The two Opium Wars imposed on China by the British in the 19th century are an illustrative example of the first. And Japan carried on its depredations throughout the 1930s and during World War II. And now that China is strong it is determined to not let this happen again. But the flip side is that Beijing not only wants to be militarily strong to defend itself, it also wants to turn the Asia-Pacific region into its regional enclave as, it believes, it was historically when China was the centre of the world.
And this is creating a lot of tension with its neighbours over the sovereignty of some of the disputed islands in the South China Sea and East China Sea. China is determined to hold its ground and has been increasing its defence budget by double-digit figures over several years now. Officially, China’s defence budget last year was $ 132 billion, the second largest after the US where it is inching towards $ 600 billion. Justifying such a rise, a spokeswoman for the NPC said, “As a large country, China needs the military strength to be able to protect its national security and people.”
All in all, the picture that emerged from the NPC session is of a country led by the Communist Party of China under General Secretary Xi Jinping, who is also president of the country, confident of steering the ship of the nation to revive China’s ancient glory. The important question is: will its neighbours accept China’s version of its history and geostrategic vision? That might be examined some other time.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia.
