COMMENT China and Southeast Asian need to
be bold By Walden Bello
China's once-in-a-decade leadership
transition will have major implications for
China's neighbors in Southeast Asia. Given this,
it might be worthwhile to review the changing
understanding of the momentous developments in
China on the part of people in our region, using
my generation - the so-called "baby boomers" - as
an example.
Many in my generation in
Southeast Asia came of age during the tempestuous
years of the Mao era, when China was seeking to
assert itself as a
revolutionary beacon and undergoing the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Many were
radicalized by the twin forces of the Vietnamese
struggle for national liberation against the
United States and China's bid for revolutionary
leadership in the third world.
Mao and
Southeast Asian youth Throughout Southeast
Asia in the 1960s, young radicals gravitated away
from the established pro-Soviet communist parties
that had been dominant for four decades and went
on to form new communist parties based on the
Chinese model. In the Philippines, the Communist
Party was reestablished in December 1968 and the
New People's Army was founded in March 1969. The
Chinese imprint was very visible: the basic
military strategy was to surround cities from the
countryside in a "protracted people's war" relying
on the peasantry as the main force of the
revolution, not the urban working class.
Many in my generation were more attracted
to this vision of armed revolution than the
parliamentary struggle that was then regarded as
the trademark of the pro-Soviet communist parties.
I would say, however, that what led some of us to
join the organized left in the early 1970s was not
so much its revolutionary promise as the fact that
it was the only force that seemed capable of
resisting the Marcos dictatorship that was foisted
on the country in 1972.
China's break with
the rapid industrialization model espoused by the
Soviet Union struck a resonant chord among
intellectuals in countries where more than two
thirds of the work force was in the countryside
and the massive amount of capital needed for a
large-scale rapid industrialization program was
simply not available. Yet nor was their any
appetite for countryside-led development based on
the commune system. It was the Chinese model of
armed revolution that attracted so many of us, not
China as a model of development.
Deng
and the countryside The twists and turns of
Chinese domestic politics in the 1970s and '80s,
along with the crisis of socialism, led many of us
to become cooler about China, even as the
political limitations, economic illusions, and
ethical flaws of Maoist and Leninist approaches
became apparent to us in our efforts at social
transformation. Many activists left the
traditional organized left in the late 1980s,
concerned about development with equity and
sovereignty even as they saw classical
Marxism-Leninism as anachronistic. It is from this
perspective that I developed my stance towards
Deng Hsiao Ping's policies in the 1980s and '90s.
This process was probably less a theoretical than
a subliminal one, as is usually the case.
I was cautiously optimistic about the
introduction of more market forces into the
countryside, which allowed farmers to
significantly raise their income. Under the
"Household Responsibility Contract System", each
household was given a piece of land to farm. The
household was allowed to retain what was left of
what it produced after selling a fixed proportion
to the state, or simply paying a tax. The rest it
could consume or sell on the market.
I
distinctly remember reading an article about
Deng's rural reforms in the Washington Post in
1982, and while it challenged my cautious views on
market reform, I felt this was the way for China
to go if the conditions of life for the country's
masses of peasants were to improve after the chaos
of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, looking back,
my instinctive reactions were justified. Between
1978 and 1984, rural poverty, according to
official estimates, declined from 33% to 11% of
the population. Put another way, the number of
poor people declined from 260 million to 89
million in a matter of six years.
Export-oriented
industrialization However, I was less
enamored with the policy shift towards
export-oriented industrialization that occurred in
1984, which portended that China's rapid
modernization would be carried out on the backs of
peasants and workers. For China's neighbors, such
export-led industrialization had led to a decline
in rural income growth, a deterioration of
agriculture, and repressive working conditions. My
1990 book, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle
Economies in Crisis, documented this underside
of rapid development in South Korea, Taiwan, and
Singapore.
Indeed, in China, peasant
income - which had grown by 15.2% a year from 1978
to 1984 - dropped by 2.8% a year from 1986 to
1991. Some recovery occurred in the early part of
the 1990s, but stagnation of rural income marked
the latter part of the decade. In contrast, urban
income, already higher than that of the peasants
in the mid-1980s, was on average six times the
income of peasants by 2000.
Nevertheless,
one could not but be impressed by the boldness of
Deng's reforms: the building of massive
export-processing zones, the invitation to foreign
capital, the loosening of restrictions on domestic
entrepreneurs, the tying of China's future to the
export markets of Europe and the United States.
There was nothing new about these thrusts. Taiwan
and South Korea had adopted them in the
mid-sixties, some twenty years earlier. It was the
scale and speed with which the reorientation was
done that was impressive in the case of China.
There was also the sense that China could
tie its future to the Western markets and Western
capital while still preserving its autonomy
because it had carried out something that few
other developing countries had been able to do:
successfully carry out a national revolution to
create a strong state that could bargain on equal
terms with global capital and a hegemon like the
United States. Most other developing countries,
unlike China, were very susceptible to global
capital and to domination by the premier state of
the global capitalist system.
China at
63 Nearly 30 years since its decisive move
toward foreign-capital-led, export-oriented
industrialization, China's success is being
undermined by a multisided ecological, equity, and
governance crisis.
Citizen participation
in governance is minimal, with the Communist Party
continuing to monopolize political decision-making
(though it must be acknowledged that village-level
elections that involve some degree of free choice
have been introduced).
China's
environmental crisis is now global in scope. China
is now the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse
gases, accounting for some 29% of total emissions
in 2011, up by 9% from 2010.
Inequality
has worsened. With its gini-coefficient - a
measure if inequality - rising to 0.47 in 2010,
China is now a more unequal society than the
United States, a far cry from the egalitarian
society that the revolution was supposed to bring
to China. A recent New York Times article on the
economic activities of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's
relatives revealed how the families of the high
officials of the Communist Party of China have
been able to corner much of the wealth created by
the policies of the last few years.
Moreover, the model of foreign
capital-dependent, export-oriented
industrialization is now at the center of debate
in the party and government.
In 2008, in
response to the deepening economic crisis in its
main markets, the United States and Europe, China
launched a $585-billion stimulus program to enable
the domestic market to make up for the loss of
export demand. This has had fleeting success,
however. China's growth rate in the first half of
2012 declined to 7.8%, its slowest pace in three
years. The main reason appeared to be its
continuing dependence on Northern markets and its
inability to institutionalize domestic demand as
the key engine of the economy.
China's
failure to break with export-led growth, rather
than merely a case of structural dependency,
reflected a set of interests from the reform
period that, as the respected technocrat Yu Yong
Ding put it, "have morphed into vested interests,
which are fighting hard to protect what they
have". The export lobby, which brings together
private entrepreneurs, state enterprise managers,
foreign investors, and government technocrats,
remains the strongest lobby in Beijing.
Indeed, according to Yu, China's "growth
pattern has now almost exhausted its potential".
China, the economy that most successfully rode the
globalization wave, "has reached a crucial
juncture: without painful structural adjustments,
the momentum of its economic growth could suddenly
be lost. China's rapid growth has been achieved at
an extremely high cost. Only future generations
will know the true price."
When I was in
Vietnam last year, some people in the government
there asked me if I thought that China had entered
a new phase in its development - whether it had
transitioned from Deng's preferred posture of
keeping a low profile internationally while
focusing on economic development to one where it
was now striving for regional hegemony. Was China,
the Vietnamese asked me, turning from an
inward-looking country focused on modernization
into an outward-oriented power seeking regional
hegemony?
The question was, of course,
related to the inexplicable claim China was making
to the whole South China Sea, or what Vietnamese
call the East Sea and Filipinos now call the West
Philippine Sea. The Chinese "nine-dash-line" claim
has become extremely destabilizing, not only
because it so brazenly violates the United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Seas that recognizes
for each country a 200-mile Exclusive Economic
Zone (EEZ), but also because it would subject to
Chinese domestic jurisdiction one of the world's
most active international waterways.
Moreover, it has provided the United
States an opportunity to reinsert itself
aggressively into the region, converting a
territorial dispute that could be resolved through
multilateral diplomacy - if China would only allow
that - into a superpower confrontation.
Challenges to the new
leadership For all these reasons, the
leadership transition that is currently taking
place in Beijing is of interest not only to the
Chinese but to the whole world. The questions that
are now uppermost in the minds of many include the
following:
Will the new Chinese government headed by
incoming President Xi Jin Ping definitively move
to a new economic paradigm that would put an
emphasis on income redistribution and be more
ecologically friendly?
Will the new leadership institutionalize new
ways to address the grievances of peasants and
migrant workers and make them genuine stakeholders
in the Chinese miracle?
Will China's new leaders move towards
promoting more citizen participation in governance
and make a major effort to root out the now
pervasive corruption that is a serious threat to
their legitimacy?
Will the new leadership become more flexible
in global negotiations on climate change, so that
in the coming United Nations Climate Conference in
Doha, Qatar, it will declare itself - as the
world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases - open
to accepting mandatory cuts in its emissions?
Will the new leadership move away from
confrontation and declare itself open to
multilateral negotiations to resolve the
territorial disputes with Southeast Asian
countries in the South China Sea?
A
second chance? There was a time during the
early 1990s, before the Asian financial crisis,
when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) was still influential and China still
placed a great deal of emphasis on good relations
with its neighbors, that many of us felt that a
new era was dawning in the region, a time when
countries could finally develop the mature
relations that had been stunted by decades of Cold
War. Finally, I felt, developments were eroding
the rationale that the United States presented for
its military presence in the region: that it was
the guarantor of peace and stability in the
region.
That maturation of Asian relations
did not come about. The Asian financial crisis,
unfortunately, eroded the prestige of ASEAN and
the effectiveness of the once promising ASEAN
Regional Forum as an institution for the
discussion and resolution of regional security
issues, while China and the United States went on
to develop their own special relationship that has
oscillated from complementary to adversarial.
There is still time to move away from the
course of confrontation that threatens the region
with America's reckless "Pivot to Asia", but it
will take a really bold effort on the part of
ASEAN leaders and the new Chinese leadership to
reach out to each other. Given the propensity of
history to spring surprises on us, I would not
preclude such a development.
Walden
Bello is a member of the House of
Representatives of the Philippines representing
the Akbayan (Citizens' Action) Party. This column
is adapted from a speech he gave at the China
Institute at the University of Alberta on October
24, 2012.
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