p. 12 A recent book by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang purports to explain ‘How China became capitalist’ but that is to explain something that never happened. The chinese economy is exactly what the Chinese leaders say it is: a socialist market economy. It is a socialist economy in which market mechanisms are used to a significant degree, and a market economy with extensive state ownership and controls.”
p. 13 “Behind the official banks, which are state owned, is a murky sector of quasi=private shadow banking, must of it technically illegal, which offers investors higher returns than they can get in banks and norrowers credit which they might otherwise not find… This sector now accounts for a third or more of all credit in the economy and has been growing ferociously in recent years, at an estimated annual rate in turnover of some 30 per cent.”
p. 15 “Foreign visitors gaze in amazement at the lights and glitter of Chsanhai and see there CHina’s new capitalism before their eyes – but mostly without knowing that Shanghai has an exceptionally small private sector (the Shanghai economis is about 80% in public ownership, measured in production)”
p. 19 “The official GDP of the provinces adds up to about 10% more than the GDP of the nation.. China may have grown to the world’ secon biggest economy, but even if the official statistics were true, that still amounts to only about 10% of global GDP for 20% of global population. In per capita terms, CHina’s national income is at best a sixth of that of the United States, the economy it is supposedly overtaking.”
p. 20 “Mega-growth is now over and is starting to be seen, correctly, as a relatively short period of recovery… The population is no longer growing other than by increased logevity. The national birth rate is 1.6 or 1.7 children per woman, in cities below 1 and in large cities fown to 0.7 or less. IN the next 15 years the share of the population that is 60 or older will increase from 14 to 25%.”
p/ 21 “A recent study for another international consultancy, the COnference Board, finds actual annual growth in years with official rates of about 10% yo have been typically about 7-7.5%. Taking the best growth periods for China and other East Asian countries, the study finds China’s growth to fall slightly short of that of South Kirea, Taiwan and Japan. .. Estimates by researchers at the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission suggest that almost half of the total investment in the Chinese economy in the years 2009-2013 (the period of post-2008-recession stimulus) was ‘ineffective’.”
p. 22 “The economy is probably about a third smaller than it is made out to be officially. Rather than up there with the United States, it is a second-tier economy, more like Hapan or Germany, and in per capita terms only a middle-income one. … Another effective is that economic inequality, although groteque even by official statistics, has probably been underestimated, since the share of wealth held by the very rich has been estimated relative to an inflated total.”
p. 29 South Korea’s modernisation is the greatest development story ever told. China’s development in some ways looks similar: rising from the ashes of dstruction, strong leadership by an authoritarian state, a complex mesh of state and capitalism, rapid growth. But that comparison does not hold long…. THe Chinese story is one of bigness, but in greatness it is not much up against, for example, the story of South Korea, or for that matter of Taiwan. .. in the time South Korea made itself a high-income country, China has made itself no more than a middle-income one… China’s modernisation is narrowly economic. In South Korea and Taiwan, modernisation has been comprehensive: economic yes, but also political and social.
p. 30 “I am not all that impressed by China’s growht. It is not unprecedented, not unique, and not lasting. It has been , in its best times, pretty typical for East Asia. The economy got off to a good start after the revolution in 1949 but then ground to a halt in a wasted generation. It picked up again as of the 1980s, but if we take the entire period of the People’s Republic it has been less than it should have been by the standards of the region… IT has been assumed that what enabled the South Korean state to lead as effectively as it did was that it had autocratic strength.. HOwever, in our study we found that although the development state had strength, and used, it, strength was not its defining characteristic. What made this state effective was rather an unexpectedly sophisticated use of strength… it was not by subduing its population with strength that they pulled the country along in development. They did that by mobilising their population into a grand project of modernisation. Success came from the way the state worked with society.”
p. 31 “Both regimes were challenged by uprisings in their population, in Korea in 1987 and China in 1989, but reacted differently. In Korea, the authoritarian regime tried to survive… but was unable to hold on to power and stepped aside to allow democratic reform. In China, the regime did not give in, but reached for its ultimate pwoer resource, the military, and crushed the revolt with weaponry. In Korea, there being no party-state, the leaders could not react similarly. They did not have a similar resource of ultimate power at their disposal and did not have the justification for the use of force that is contained in the ideological and organisational structure of a party-state.Presiding over a country that was not monolithic but built on vibrant civil society institutions which had evolved during the period of modernisation, including in business and voluntarism, the authoritarian leader could relinquish control without fearing that their project of modernisation would collapse, indeed had to give in such an attempt to hold on to power with force would have destroyed the project that was their raison d’etre and their only claim to legitimacy.
p. 33 South Kirea was an unruly nation, and those who are old enough will remember, for example, the constant street battles between students and police. This unrest was important not because, until the end, it threatened the regime, but because it contributed to never silencing the demand for democracy. But this unruliness was still on the surface. Underneath as a compliant and hard-working population. .. The government … extracted obedience by delivering economic growth. It bought itself legitimacy with the help of education and social security. It have people reasons for compliance by forcing employers, at least in the big corporations, to provide occupational welfare to workers nad their families, and to be at least marginally better employers than they were themselves inclined to be, and by directing voluntary agencies to deliver social services. And importantly, it mobilsed people across the country through a cultural revolution under the name of the Saemaul movement ..paternalistic movements .. extractive movements that put rural communities and industrial labourersand their families to work in development projects large and small … without much of government funding. But they were also organisations that gave millions of Kireans the experience of being members and particiants in associations, committees, councils and the like. They were grassroots movements that fed into, as did the betwork of voluntary agencies, civil society vibrancy.”
p. 35 IN territory, CHina is about the same as Canada or the United States but smaller than Russia. In population it is enormous, now nearing 1.4 billion people, over four times as many as the United States and 10 times as many as Russia. Much of the country is rough mountainous terrain and a surprisingly small part comfortable arable land. The Chinese population has grown from about 500 million in 1949 , and is still growing, although more slowly. It is expected to peak at between 1.5 and 1.6 billion around mid-century and then start falling. By that time, China will probably have been overtaken by India as the world’s most populous country.”
p. 37 “In Giangzhoi, the city, in the kind of development that is possible only in a command economy, has in the couse of a few years, created a mega-university complex on an idland in the Pearl River by clearing away the peasantry that used to cultivate its land and having 10 universities build new campuses one next to the other. If you drive through, you see a landscape of shiny and impressive architecture, but inside, buildings only 10 years old are already worn and crumbling. The regime has thrown money into GDP growth, but not generally obtained comensurate growth. Standards of living have been rising, but at less than the pace of economic growth.
p. 38 Nearly half the population remains rural, far removed from life in modern cities, much of it living off backwards agriculture and in developing country conditions. The modern economy is geared to copying what others have invented or to doing the assembly work on foreign designs, but has so far developed less innovation capacity and does not have a single world-class brand to its name.”
p. 127 Chinese schooling appears to be performing well in some international comparisons of Educational quality, notably in the PISA study undertaken by OECD. the results, however, as so often with statistics from China, are bogus. in the PISA study, China is represented by Shanghai, it’s most advanced City, and Shanghai by a selection of schools that excludes those for migrant children.
p. 134 “The best interpretation of social policies in China today is that they are designed to do what is necessary as seen from the needs of the regime. When necessity presents itself, provision materialises. When mass unemployment struck in the 1990s, social assistance was provided with some energy. When necessity recedes, provision is tempered… When marketization resulted in a housing crisis for those who had not got on to the ladder of upwards prices early enough, some public housing provision was brought back… {Leaders] are not in seach of any broad consensus. Their social policy is exactly what it is intended to be: another instrument of stability and control, so much and no more.”
p. 137 “while the state may in some ways have retreated from directly running things, the party has extended its reach… it does not tell everyone everything he or she must do. But it does control that the people do not do what they must not, and it does so in great detail, from not hvaing children that should not be had via not reading or seeing or hearing what should not be read or seen or heard, to not practicing faiths that should not be practices – and anove all to not organising… Under Mao, people were expected not only to believe in the part and to obey the party line but also to show their devotion in their daily lives, fror example in the way they dressed and the entertainment they enjoyed. This nonsense the Chinese have been freed from. … It is not that they are not controlled when it matters, only that they are not bossed around when it does not matter.”
p. 138 “Behind it all lies, always, the threat of punishment, harassment, detention, the loss of jor or home, retribution against family and friends, violence and ultimately death…. It is not just an authoritarian state. It is a dictatorship.” But I have also said ‘dictatorship’ is not an adequate label. It is too unsophisticated. China is now a dictatorship in which dictate is restrained and in which, except in the last resort, indirect control is substituted for direct command… makes the CHinese state a kind of dictatorship never seen before. That kind of dictatorship needs a name. It is not an autocracy; that is too benevolent. It is nor a dictatorship like others; that is too primitive. I give it the name of controlocracy.”
p. 176 “What we are seeing in the China Dream is the embryo of an ideology that is ultra-dangerous. It is that because it sits on a rhetoric of power and national greatness and because, ultimately, it is an ideology in which the person ceases to exist as an autonomous being and is subsumed in the nation. If individual happiness comes from national greatness, then the pursuit of national greatness is an undivided good. … there is no autonous good for individual women and men that might restrain the national project or the policies of the party-state that is the custodian of that project… at its core … a fascist idea, the fascist idea. Even communist ideology (if of course not practice) has been built in the enlightenment spirit that persons are objectives and that systems are for their good, and that they prove themselves by promoting the good of individual women and men… This is not abstract theorising. In Fascist Europe there was no limit to repression, no limit to aggression, no limit to evil, no limit to political murder, and no limit to sacrifice that was not for the good of the people. .. It is too early to tell. After Mao and until Xi Jinpiang, the Chinese state was in my schema a trivial one, successful and increasingly strong but with a regime carefully dedicated to self-preservation and ready to accept almost any price for stability. That may endure. The Chinese state is a sophisticated dictatorship but, as things stand today, possibly not yet an ideological one. It is a near totalitarian regime but not fully totalitarian.”
p.
About