I've been reading Peter Navarro's The coming China wars. I knew things were bad in China, but I had no idea of how bad the rot had gotten. It's ironic that the people's paradise now bans all labor unions, effectively locking workers into sweatshop working conditions where the workers are by any definition slaves. It's as if they've fallen through time into the western industrial age of the late 19th century. The country is facing severe environmental degradation, the shortage of clean water, a crippling AIDS crisis, a collapse of the social services for the poor and the elderly, and growing civil unrest.
And it appears that the government is simply going to continue to stuff its pockets while it hangs on for the ride.
Why should we care, you might ask - well a self-destructing China will most likely become an aggressive world player.
2 comments:
I would suggest that their recent wild economic growth is just them finding a new point of equilibrium after introducing a certain amount of freedom into their economy.
As for a revolution, check out Zimbabwe. It hasn't happened there yet and that is the Grand National Chamion basket case.
Yes and no. It seems that the Chinese government is fixing the game. They manipulate their currency to keep imports out. They impose sweatshop conditions through the party machinery that allow them to undercut wages of all other 3rd world countries. They tolerate counterfeiting because whole regions in the south have built their economies around it. Their banks have become major centers of money laundering and they produce the precursor chemicals for the majority of crystal meth produced in Mexico for import into the US.
As for Zimbabwe, since the international community has sanctioned them, China has stepped in and become one of their largest foreign investors.
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