DRR on Sunday, October 10, 2010 9:36 PM wrote:
>Not sure why China is drawing such ire.
[MW]: It has lied for 30 some years now that it has been a socialist country all along. Its bureaucratic-comprador capitalist party likewise has lied in its throat claiming it's a communist party.
Very few commenters complain about Brazil, Russia and India for lying.
> On Sun, October 10, 2010 5:02 pm, Mark Wain forwarded:
>
>> There are no social services, no health care, no
>> government-sponsored consumer protections from harmful and
>> falsely-advertised products (of which plethora abound), etc.
>
> Not sure why China is drawing such ire. China is a huge country with
> continental-sized contradictions -- it has plenty of social services and
> the beginnings of a welfare state, though much more needs to be done. As
> far as false advertisements go, peasants don't become urban citizens
> overnight -- China is going through the same transition phase many other
> urbanizing societies have gone through.
[MW]: I believe Mr. Franklin H. Ferrel who report that there are no social services, etc. are true for workers and peasants. Those who have good "quan xi" (connections) have everything there can be. Recall: in Mao's era poor peasants and workers got health care and other government-sponsored social services.
> A much more productive question is, where should China's developmental
> state go in the future -- i.e. how can it facilitate more democracy,
> social equity, and ecological investment. This is becoming an urgent
> necessity, because China is about to become a middle income country (i.e.
> a per capita GDP greater than $4000). It can't rely on cheap labor and
> consumer exports anymore, and its internal market is now a significant
> factor of global demand. Possibly Brazil and Russia might offer some
> useful models here, at least for the urban regions of China.
>
> -- DRR
[MW]: It's simply meaningless to claim $4,000 or greater per capta GDP. Most of the income portion of the GDP belongs to the ruling class of rich and super-rich bureacratic-comprador capitalists and their families in China and working people's income share of the GDP is disproportionally small related to their huge size of population.
There are three main resources for the latecomers of the capitalist world to exploit for "developments". They are (1) abundant low-cost and obedient labor power, (2) resource of plenty of unpolluted environments for development-required pollution and (3) significant natural resources.
China has all three resources except petroleum, natural gas, forests and some other minerals such as iron ore and developments have exploited them to the bone. China has made improvements in people's material living standards. However, at what human costs did China achieve these improvements? At what risks and losses of the three resources has China made these achievements possible?
The cheap labor power resource is no longer abundant. The labor force that made meager wages for the capital, domestic or foreign, bureaucratic or private, comprador or transnational or multinational, to make super-profits, are tired, retiring or having returned to villages and towns. Their continuing educations and personal betterments are paltry at the best; their labors were a total waste as far as the net gain of the society is concerned. The only thing that they can be proud of perhaps is that some bosses employed them to work almost for nothing.
The ecological damages by serving as a colossal world factory of the capitalist economic growth have forced China to pay dearly. China has nearly used up its pollution resource. The total amount of cost of recovery of land, air, water and health conditions back to their 1976 levels is astronomical; it may even be more than the aggregated G.D.P. of the coastal provinces for the past 34 years.
The natural resources including drinkable water become scarce and China has to import most of them from overseas at an enormous cost and dependency. The world factory has become a world mineral, energy and raw material monopoly.
The beneficiaries of the achievements are not the ordinary people but a tiny minority of population - rich and super-rich plutocrats of the world - Chinese bureaucratic-comprador capitalists and their complicit patrons - international monopoly capitalists.
The capitalist opinion-producers have consecrated China's explosive development to godhood and savior for the Western capital in distress. Nevertheless, they do not want to inform their readership about the fact that China's "achievements" is concomitant with the destruction of environments and worsening global warming, let alone the loss of the three resources.
As the competitive advantages of the BRIC countries fade into oblivion, business upgrading to high-end technology all of a sudden become utmost urgent. All want to do more design that is original and build their own brand. They think upgrading to high-tech is just as easy as they did the capitalist construction and development for the past 30 years or so, by taking advantages of the dirty hard work of research, design, development and scale-up that the advanced capital had done for them for free.
That ready-made upgrading plan is a dream. The advanced capital could give them the low- or mid-tech manufacturing business because they were labor intensive or low in value but they cannot afford to transfer to them high-tech business for obvious reason. Besides, world's over congestions of outlets of capital-intensive investment and overproduction thwart heavily the newcomers from entering into the game play, caused by ever decreasing affordable demand.
A consumer middle class can go into being only by shared profits between capitalists and workers, either willingly through legal means or under duress by mandate of the working class struggle. In China, neither of these two conditions exists for the near future. The nation's wide income gaps will not shrink and a more balanced and sustainable economic growth is out of the question.
Because of the powerlessness of the labor of the world, income inequality is so large that affordable demand that decreases daily forestalls a healthy recovery of the global economy. The relentless depredations of capital over the wages of direct producers of the world for the past four decades have now suddenly come back to haunt it. Capitalism everywhere has mired itself into an indomitable abyss of intrinsic contradictions.
Only revolution can solve the capitalist fundamental contradictions but that is a different question for now.
Mark