James Fallows has a fantastic post on the contrast between the outsider's view of China as a rapidly-rising superpower and the view from inside of China as a very poor country wracked with enormous problems and challenges.
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China's Semisuperpowerdom
12 Apr 2008 02:12 pm
Comments (13)
I've always been convinced that the rising superpower/Chinese century narrative has largely been propagated by people who have either never been to China, or, if they have, have never left Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen. If you go to just about any second/third tier city in the East or any city at all in the West it's very obvious that China is very much a developing country wracked with intractable environmental, social, and economic problems. The environmental problems in particular are unlikely to get much better in the medium term and will ultimately hobble the continued growth of the Chinese economy as arable land dries up and the rivers disappear.
Why can't a superpower have lots of poor people and intractable problems?
The reason for the apparently conflicting views of China as superpower vs. China as poor country is the fact that world power status owes as much to size as to wealth. So, there isn't necessarily much of a contradiction at all.
Consider how big China's economy would be if they managed to reach the same GDP/capita level as (for example) Mexico. If you have 1/5 of the world's population, you don't have to be affluent to be powerful.
Pithlord- because China's putative superpower status is mostly dependent on it having a powerful, continually growing economy. If the economy cools off because of its problems, or if its value was wildly overestimated in the first place, it makes it kind of hard to see how that will happen.
Is this the second time you linked to this article, or have I just started reading Ezra Klein?
Well, China is in essence two countries. A very wealthy country in the east and a very, very poor country in the west.
the link in my second post should have been to this story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7148695.stm
The contrast is not that distinct. Many western analysts have long predicted doom for China. Economic collapse. Environmental collapse. Geographic fragmentation.
Look at some of Stratfor's headlines (recent to old):
China's Risky Pension Fund Plan
China: The Rising Tensions Over Land Grabs
China: Staving Off a Foreign Bad-Debt Problem
China: Efforts to Manage the Fuel Crisis
China's Woes and Limitations
And my favorite:
China's Long March to Bankruptcy (March 2005)
I am thinking the same thing as I did when I read Fallow's previous post. How does this compare with a Londoner/Parisian touring 1900 America, esp say Nebraska? Or for that matter, the Lower East Side?
"I am thinking the same thing as I did when I read Fallow's previous post. How does this compare with a Londoner/Parisian touring 1900 America, esp say Nebraska? Or for that matter, the Lower East Side?
Posted by Kolohe | April 12, 2008 11:27 PM"
I haven't seen numbers on this, but I would guess there is a much bigger economic difference between Alabama and Guizhou today than between Nebraska and the relevant areas in Britain in 1900. IIRC China today has a much higher proportion of its population working in agriculture than the US in 1900. A lot of China's power to date comes from 1) the pure size of the domestic market, so you have to play by China's rules on certain things if you want access 2) finance, foreign currency reserves, etc. (basically the fact that they own the dollar pretty much at this point) and 3) a large military (but not one that could easily defeat the US military and would probably never be able to go on the offensive against the US mainland without using nukes).
"IIRC China today has a much higher proportion of its population working in agriculture than the US in 1900"
Actually, about the same proportion
"IIRC China today has a much higher proportion of its population working in agriculture than the US in 1900"
Actually, about the same proportion
Comments closed April 26, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Although India is not considered a superpower, there is a similar dissonance between its image and the the reality. And you don't even have to go to interior of the country: just the stink outside the New Delhi railway station is evidence enough.
Posted by gregor | April 12, 2008 3:27 PM