20060418   

Michael considered fate at 19:47   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

I have said it before and I'll say it again: While China may be a growing economic force they still have much to overcome and I don't think it's going to be an easy road ahead. The market may suggest that China is right around the corner from becoming the world economic powerhouse but I truly believe that many in the west are underestimating the hurdles that China faces.

China's rural culture and it's urban counter-part are at severe odds, for example. As urban areas grow the poor farmers are being displaced. They are becoming poorer and their support system of free health and education is deteriorating. Most villages hold the land communally and when that land is "bought" (or seized) for condos or other urban development, the villagers are left out in the cold, unable to find decent work in the cities, and are viewed as second-class citizens. They're lucky to get maid jobs. This would not be such a huge factor if not for the fact that these rural citizens account for over 60% of the countries population - over 800 million.

Additionally, China's continued censorship is both disheartening and dangerous. Antony Thomas, producer of a recent PBS report on China,

showed the iconic 'tank man' photo to a group of undergraduates at Beijing University - in 1989 the university had been the nerve center of the student movement that inspired the nationwide uprising. None of the students knew what the photo was.

I mentioned the discrepancies between searching for images on this subject at Google.com versus Google.cn in an earlier post. There has been much news lately of uprising journalists and bloggers testing the government's resolve and I don't think this is going to end anytime soon. Many will sound off to the drumbeat, tell you that China is trying to work a middle-ground of information flow but it's a lie. It may be more obvious but it's no more or less insidious as what was suggested about public education in the U.S. a few posts below. The problem is in that obviousness - as more and more Chinese realize what is going on, the government will be less and less able to control it.

Additionally, China has aborted/killed millions of female babies in the last decade. Now, many areas there are seeing low male to female ratios - as blatantly worrisome as 2:3. If you think this isn't worrisome for them, think again.

All these problems, and then some, are going to cause the Chinese government more troubles than they bargained for. The internet and global economization are forces that have never been seen before and I am convinced that they will combine together to make for a juggernaut that they will not be able to stop. This is the information age, afterall, and information wants to be free. Will it be a citizen uprising or .. something else? I don't know but I don't think it's going to be just a smooth road ahead.

UPDATE: Unbeknownst to me, CBS' 60 Minutes did a piece on the low-female population problem this week. I was able to listen to the audio of the piece last night and you can find it here, on their podcast page, or you can just read the article Too Many Men:

The one-child policy is 25 years old, so the first generation is just now reaching marriage age, and for China that’s a big problem because it is estimated that as many as 40 million of its young men could spend their lives as bachelors..

.. The gender imbalance grew out of communist China's draconian social engineering policies, where a woman, after having one child, was forced to make a choice: sterilization or insertion of an IUD (intrauterine device).

To make sure the women kept their birth control devices in, the government — starting in 1982 — sent portable ultrasound machines all over the country. They are compact and lightweight and even some small villages got as many as two or three. But in a classic case of unintended consequences, pregnant women realized that the machines could also identify whether they were having a boy or a girl. And, as a result, by conservative estimates, more than 8 million girls were aborted in the first 20 years of the one-child policy..

.. In the early years of the one-child policy, the kidnapping of baby boys — those much desired sons — was a problem; lately, says [Zhao Baige, vice minister of the Family Planning Commission], there has been a surge in trafficking of baby girls.

Many of the infant and young girls are being sold to become wives.

"The Chinese government confiscated a large plastic bag full of 28 girl babies, ranging in age from 2 to 5 months," said [political scientist Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University].

The baby girls, whose photos were posted on the Internet, were found stuffed together in plastic bags lashed onto the roof rack of a cross-country bus. Family members had sold them to traffickers for as little as $8 apiece.

"They were being sold to families in the countryside, who were worried about not finding wives for their sons," said Hudson. "So, they would buy them as infants and raise them in the family to become the bride of their son.."

".. political instability? Do people talk about that as a risk?" [Lesley] Stahl asked.

"Yes. Yes," [Zhao], replied.