Extreme country makeover: China

Commentary by Patrick Keller

Prior to 1949, China was an unimaginably strange land. Before airlines made routine and cheap flights to the mysterious orient, we only knew of China what we read in National Geographic or ate at the local Chinese restaurant. We had no idea what they did on the other side of the world, and frankly, we didn’t much care. They would keep their bizarre ways and we would keep on being the citadel of science, economics and democracy. Then, in 1950, Chairman Mao and his Peoples Republic of China appeared on the world scene, and all of a sudden we had reason to worry. Sure they were huge in numbers, strong in culture and vast in resources. We knew that. But now, all of a sudden, they were also communists. At the time, this was the marketed as the greatest affront to our way of life, and it fueled fears that multiplied throughout the cold war. Between the Russians and Chinese and their satellite friend Cuba, we began feeling a little closed in on. Fast forward 50 years. We have now celebrated the end of communism in the former Soviet Union and the west maintains a prison camp in Cuba. By most accounts, we have won the battle of good vs. evil. But what about China? I guess we were wrong in thinking that if we kept buying all of the cheap Chinese electronics, running shoes and industrial equipment that we would eventually woo her over to our way of thinking. Darn! Now China has the distinction of being the biggest, strongest, most economically demanding neighbour left who doesn’t conform to our ways. She just will not give in! What do you do with a neighbour like her? And, she has almost bankrupted us with those never ending fleets of ocean liners. They cross the seas daily, bringing incredibly good deals on stuff we barely need but so badly want. Despite our griping about gross human rights abuses (think Tiananmen Square, or Tibet) China has managed to bring hundreds of millions of her citizens up from the mire of poverty, in one of the fastest growing middle class experiments ever. Now, privileged Chinese have tasted what they have been missing for last half a century (see cell phones and sports cars). They want it, and they deserve it as much as their western neighbors. Double darn! Their government has received the message and mandated a shift from an 80 per cent agrarian, 20 per cent urban society to an 80 per cent urban, 20 per cent agrarian one as it strives to bring its people into the “modern age.” The Yangtze River’s Three Gorges Dam is a glaring example of this paradox. The dam will be the world’s largest hydroelectric system when it is completed in 2009. The massive project sets records for number of people displaced (at least 1.3 million), number of cities and towns flooded (13 cities, 140 towns, 1,350 villages), and length of reservoir (more than 600 kilometers). Like everything Chinese, it is huge. And so are the problems facing China. As industry and urbanism swallow up China’s farmland, she is increasingly unable to feed her 1.3 billion people. According to the World Health Organization, poverty in China is still a very real issue, with 10 per cent of her citizens existing on one dollar a day or less. As China faces a future of economic prosperity countered by a dwindling food supply, she will look to the rest of the world for her sustenance. Compounding that problem, China seems to be steamrolling ahead in areas of industry. Entire cities are being built around industries that the west has long decided are too environmentally damaging to sustain. During the Olympic Games, pollution levels in Beijing have exceeded World Health Organization limits by five times. But, now that China’s people have tasted ‘the good life’, you can hardly blame them for not wanting to put the brakes on progress. Strangely, communist China has spent the last 50 years quietly learning how to be great capitalists. Hopefully they have learned some lessons from our mistakes, and not just our good fortune.