Last night I had dinner at the Irish Embassy in Beijing. The occasion was the departure of Joseph Kahn, the New York Times bureau chief (and Irish citizen), who is moving to New York to work as Deputy Foreign Editor for the paper. I have known Joe since the early 1990s, and China’s loss is my gain, since his couch will now be added to my list of free places to stay in Manhattan.
Joe won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the growing gap between rich and poor in China, but I think some of his best work was a recent series of reports on the environmental cost of China’s Rise.
A longer piece on the same topic by Jacques Leslie (which quotes yours truly) is the cover story in the current edition of Mother Jones.
For China, the neoliberal growth model adopted over the past quarter-century has been like the Monkey’s Paw in W.W. Jacobs’ classic, spooky short story of the same name. The story tells of a poor but happy family that comes into possession of a magical charm, the monkey’s paw, which will grant them three wishes. The father wishes for 200 dollars and his wish is granted, but not in the way he expected. The next day, a man from the factory where their only son works comes to the door and informs them that their son has been caught in machinery and killed. He gives them 200 dollars as compensation for the death.
China’s “reform and opening” (their shorthand for the market reforms instituted since the early 1980s) has likewise been a mixed experience when viewed in any but the narrowest economic terms. Overall growth has been spectacular, and contrary to the charges of many external critics, the Chinese people have also gained much greater freedom than they ever had before in a variety of areas: employment, residence, privacy, even basic things like movement and marriage which had been heavily controlled under Mao. But the economic benefits have been distributed very unequally---the gap grows wider day by day---and the new freedoms have limited meaning for the country’s poor. Material gains are also mitigated by corruption, crime, resurgent prostitution and drug use, and widely felt social anomie and insecurity. The terrible environmental cost of China’s growth is certainly the most jarring example of a seeming social advance turning into a nightmare.
Recent pronouncements by the Chinese leadership about focusing on the quality rather than just the quantity of growth are encouraging. The State Environmental Protection Administration has been given new powers, and friends tell me that it will be upgraded to ministry status in the next few years. The old rhetoric about “letting some get rich first” has been replaced by a new concern for the disadvantaged. Elimination of the agricultural tax and more funding for schools and health care in rural areas are certainly steps in the right direction.
But none of this addresses the basic problem of a system that pushes growth without limits and makes society and nature bear the cost, while allowing the benefits to flow to the wealthiest. And that’s where the analogy with the Monkey’s Paw breaks down. The evil charm’s spell brought both fortune and sorrow to the same family, but neoliberal economics distributes profits and pain very unevenly. But the good news is China doesn’t have to choose between impoverished Maoist isolation and a toxic world that looks like the set of Blade Runner. The challenge for IATP and for the world is: What can we do to help them make a better choice?
