China's Global Strategy: Toward a Multipolar World by Jenny Clegg

Author:Jenny Clegg [Clegg, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: China, Economics, Globalization, Political Science, Asia, Business & Economics, History, General
ISBN: 9780745325194
Google: F98MAQAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 8050960
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2008-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

8

DEVELOPMENT WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

China’s high-speed growth over the last nearly three decades has not been without serious social and economic costs. Remarkable reductions in poverty are taking place alongside widening gaps in income, growing regional disparities and rural–urban inequality. Economic reform has seen the rise of new socio-economic groups of rich farmers, rural and urban entrepreneurs, white-collar professionals, technicians, managers and the self-employed, which have all benefited disproportionately as the economy has grown. In the cities, laid-off state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers and a large ‘floating population’ of rural migrants coexist with the comfortably off middle class as well as a nouveau riche, which, though comparatively tiny, is highly visible. Meanwhile, for the majority of farmers, improvements in livelihood have so far failed to keep pace with the country’s overall double-digit growth. A decline in socialised services has led to increasing inequity in access to health care and education in rural and urban areas and this, together with widespread corruption and environmental degradation, has become a major social and political issue in China.

For China’s Leftist critics, these failings are the inevitable consequences of a capitalist restoration as China’s working people are transformed into a cheap, dependent, insecure, exploitable labour force. As collectivist values have become eroded in the pursuit of personal enrichment, it is argued, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the state have become alienated from worker–peasant support, even suppressing labour organisations while tilting increasingly to favour the interests of the urban elites.1

This chapter sets out not only to examine the wider social and environmental record of the reform period but also to consider the current Chinese leadership’s efforts to address the problems of the country’s unbalanced growth pattern.

The emergence of a more plural society made up of diverse interests inevitably creates more potential for conflict. The country is now seen to be entering a particularly painful stage of development with a per capita income of between US$1,000 and US$3,000 signalling a danger zone for modernisation in which the different interest groups will find it hard to come to terms with each other.2 With World Trade Organization (WTO) accession threatening to exacerbate unequal development, the government, seeking to avoid ‘Latin Americanisation’, has begun to pay far more serious attention to the social and environmental costs of China’s growth path. After all, when Deng Xiaoping advocated that some people should be allowed to ‘get rich’ first, this was in order to achieve common prosperity in the longer term.3

China’s growth path of the 1980s and 1990s, reliant on investment and exports, is now under question as the leadership seeks to adopt a new more equitable, balanced and sustainable development strategy to achieve a more ‘harmonious’ society. It is in this context that issues of human rights and democracy are now being placed more firmly on the agenda of reform. China’s immature political and legal system is seen to have become an obstacle as the Party and government seek to shift the basis of their legitimacy from fast-growth performance to delivering a better quality of growth.

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