So here's where the students and teachers part comes in. The segment of Chinese society devoted to higher education is a particularly paradoxical one, at least to the eyes of this Western observer. The incredible boom in higher education since the Deng reforms, as well as the increasing prevelance of cell phones and the internet, has created a class of college students and recent graduates who are more connected to each other than ever before. They send messages back and forth on their phones, chat on web discussion boards and take advantage of friends in other cities to visit parts of the country that they have never been to before. What they are not doing, at least not yet, is forming much in the way of a movement with any goals beyond visiting each other and improving their individual and by extension, but only by extension, their collective prosperity.
Here is where two cutting observations made me think a little differently about the potetial problems in the Chinese future. The first was told to me by my Chinese teacher, who's real job is as a "tutor" (perhaps "guidance councilor" would be a more appropriate term) here at the college. I had posed my students the question of what they would do with their money and time were they to suddenly find themselves millionaires (in American dollars no less) and was astounded by the fact that the majority of them considered this an insufficient sum despite their inability to decide how to spend it. They had no conception of how much things cost (for example that a few million dollars could buy quite a few cars but probably not an island or a college). More importantly to my perspective, they had no idea what they would do with their time if they no longer had to work out of financial concerns. And so I was complaining to Guan Laoshi about this and she said that this is a pretty universal phenomenon among Chinese college students.
She told me that they have grown up in an atomosphere where enormous emphasis is placed on earning money to "make their life (and their parents' lives) better," but they are actively discouraged from developing interests. Most of them come to college to study what they perceive as a means to this end, but they genenrally have no conception of what this work actually entails. They all want to go to Shanghai or Shenzhen to get a job in international business because it is "related to their major" but they have no idea why this is their major. They are convinced that they will get ahead by doing the same thing as everyone else. The fact that they are competing with millions of others with exactly the same qualifications does not strike them as problematic. This seems to run counter to common sense and certainly to game theory which clearly reveals this to be a loosing strategy unless you are already in a position of advantage or their is enough of everything to go around. I suppose perhaps the assumption is that in the context of an expand economy, there will be enough of everything to go around.
I am going call this class of students and young workers China's new cell-phone proletariat (to echo, in part, my earlier gadget theory). Perhaps this label is going out on a bit of a rhetorical limb, but I think that it captures the character of the group. On the whole, the cell-phone proletariat, while possesing a basic skill set that should slot them into white-collar work, are almost entirely lacking in specific skills or interests to differentiate them from the horde. They generally assume that by meeting certain minimal qualifications they can walk into a coastal city and be handed a job. Many of them even have dreams that through hard work and careful saving they could one day open a firm of their own to employ future generations' versions of themselves. With the exception of their minimally-workable college education, they are carbon (or perhaps digital) copies of the blue-collar class of unskilled laboreres: they are almost completely interchangable off-the-farm to-the-city children of technological progress, gazing with innocent eyes at the utopian vision of a perfectly boring existance.
Then my student Tom told me something that made this all the more menacing; he crystalized and idea that had been bumping around in the back of my head. Specifically, Tom told me that he and some of his more sophisticated classmates are worried about the possibility of China's annual growth rate dipping below 8% because it is already difficult for them to find good jobs. Yes, you read correcty, that is not a typo or a blurry 3, they are worried about the impact on the job market of growth rates lower than eight percent while anywhere outside of Asia a growth rate exceeding three percent is considered respectable or even high. What's more, an informal esitimate by my Chinese teacher revealed that close to half of graduates of second- and third-tier schools end up returning to the farm or taking a job at a store front. Even with an astounding rate of growth over the course of more than a decade, even with an aging population reaching retirement and even-increasing talk about China's rising fortunes, college graduates are faced with relatively high levels of unemployment and especially underemployment. Imagine what might happen if China's economy grows at something less than superhuman speed.
And, to throw one more wrench into the works, consider why China's astounding advance is not occuring evenly. The fact is that the economy here is astoundingly dependant upon cheap exports, especially to the developed world. Yes, China has a domestic market and yes, it is growing, but this is not the major reason for China's increadible ascent during the past two decades. It is no accident that nearly all of my students want to go to the coast to find a job; they may talk about the pleasant climate on the East Coast, but the main reason is because that has been the major growth area. The fact that most of the growth has been occuring on the coast only serves to accentuate the point that much of China's production doesn't stay in China. And this in turn means that China's success has largely been predicated on its ability to find international markets for those products. So what will happen to that 8% growth rate if, for example, American consumers stop consuming?
In the event of a change in the fortunes of any of China's major markets overseas, there seems to me the distinct possibility or a downturn, or a least less of an upturn in China's economic fortunes. This in turn has the potential to create a huge class of unemployed cell-phone proletarians, unemployed workers who in many cases represented the hope of their families to rise out of rural poverty and a massive expenditure of poor communities' resources (one of the former teachers here refers to these students as "their parents' retirement accounts"). What happens when a class with proletarian elements but whith markedly higher levels of education and expectations is faced with unemployment despite numbers saying their economy is growing? And what happens if this class just happens to buy a lot of electronic gadgets? Keep in mind that these are the same gadgets that are both highly correlated with freedoms that these students don't currently experiance and which give them a radically increased ability to orgainze.
The Nationalists cut down their main worry, the urban Communist movement, but Mao managed a revolution with peasants. Perhaps the Party is now paying too much attention to the peasants and neglecting the new proletariat the markets have created. Is it possible that the near future will see a showdown between the CCP and the CPP, between the Chinese Communist Party and the Cell-Phone Proletariat? I'm not saying it will happen, but it should be on the radar.
Friday, April 21
Tuesday, April 18
Students and Teachers, part 1
While recognizing China's ascent toward the pinacle of global power, it remains important to remember that it is not there yet and there are still some major hurdles remaining. In fact, in an attempt to ease his relationship with George Bush, Hu Jintao recently confided that the Chinese government is presently too concerned with a lot of internal problems to focus overly much attention on expanding its global political power. In other words, he admited that China is not yet ready to confront the United States for global dominance and that China is still very much a developing country, albeit a very big and exceptional one.
In fact, many of the internal problems Hu pointed to mirror some of those discussed in this blog. China's size is its singular source of strength but also of difficulties. Electric power, environmental destruction, health care, rural poverty and underdevelopment are common problems in developing countries but in China these problems occur on an unprecidented scale. In fact, the very size of these problems is such that they cannot nessisarily be addressed simply by scaling up the traditional solutions. But let's put these problems aside and look at another way in which China is a significant exception and which seems to me to have a greater potential to truly upset the internal order of Chinese society.
It is often observed that there is a high degree of correlation between economic and social progress. In the developed world, times of rapid social progress tend to coincide with periods of economic prosperity (take, for instance, the civil rights movement in America which occured during the post-war boom years of the fifties and sixties). Perhaps more importantly, this relationship holds across changes in place as well as changes in time - countries with higher degress of personal and civic freedom tend to be those with higher levels of economic growth and development.
I once came across a "golf course theory of global conflict" which proposed an inverse relationship between incidence of golf courses and of war, which is to say that countries with more golf courses tend to go to war less often and almost never go to war with other countries with a lot of golf courses. Of course, this theory is intended to be somwhat humourous, but it bears out quite well in fact. This is essentially because golf courses are a pretty good proxy for large amounts of leisure and therefore for a high level of economic development, as well as for Westernization. So in other words we could simply say that rich Westernized countries don't go to war very much and almost never go to war with each other.
We could similarly posit a "gadget theory of social freedoms" linking the number of new electronic gadgets purchased by the average person every year to the relative level of social liberties in the society. In this case, gadget purchases are effectively standing in for purchasing power, which is in turn highly correlated overal prosperity (both in terms of income level and income growth). The reasons for this are potentially complex. Economic growth is often assumed to depend on market freedoms as well as on adequate and fair policing; these in turn tend to either cause or result from a free and just society. In The Moral Concequences of Economic Growth Benjamin Friedman proposes the converse, that growth tends to make people happier and more willing to extend help and privelages to others, especially because growth tends to make job competition less fierce by making it easier to get ahead.
Regardless of the reasons, we expect countries with growing prosperity to also expand both personal and civil liberties. By both Friedman's formal comparison of growth rates and my own informal counts of cell phones and MP3 players, this trend seems to bear out. Look at Korea for example: in the South, more and better cell phones and commesurately expanding social liberties; in the North, no cell phones, no freedom. By both of these standards, however, China stands as a major exception; it stands for many practical purposes as the exception.
Why is China such a significant exception? To answer this question, at least in part, we should first look at a time when China was not such a big exception. During the 1980s, following the exconomic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping, China did in fact appear to be on course to expand social and political freedoms as well. Over the course of the decade, there was a continuing push-pull between the progressive and conservative wings of the Chinese Communist Party; first they would give more freedoms, then they would decide they had gone too far and take some back. Overall, the result of this was as sort of "two steps forward one step back" that ultimately was making a slow sort of progress. This was, of course, until the events at Tian'anmen Square.
As pundits like to predict, the gradual liberalization of China brought increased calls for further liberalization. In 1989 this took the form of pro-democracy demostrations by students in Beijing. This type of mass movement made the government very nervous and ultimately led to a major crackdown. Since the crackdown, students have been very wary of demostrating against the government, although in the past several years there has been a steep increase in the number and degree of protest from other segments of society (especially farmers). The received wisdom is that Chinse students were faced on the one hand with the threat of severe crackdowns if they continued to make demands of the government and on the other hand with the prospect of an increasingly promising economy and job market; in this context, they made the obvious choice.
In other words, the CCP discovered that at least a temporary way out of the pressure for liberalization was to make sure that the bulk of students were upwardly mobile and therefore had an invested interest in the maintenence of the current social order. So long as the educated classes remained content with making money, they would not make other demands upon the state. The rest of society, for its part, is easy to keep isolated and unable to form a united movement by the simple policy of inducting any overly ambitious or capable individual into the party structure. As long as the protests remain rural and disconnected, the CCP's control of the state and its resistance to liberalization is safe. If the expanding educated class starts to see lessining prospects for upward mobility, then the Party may be in trouble and China may cease to be the exception. There are some signs that this trouble is on the horizon.
I have to go to class. I will post part 2, with my 3 anecdotal revelations and what i view as their concequences as soon as I get the chance.
In fact, many of the internal problems Hu pointed to mirror some of those discussed in this blog. China's size is its singular source of strength but also of difficulties. Electric power, environmental destruction, health care, rural poverty and underdevelopment are common problems in developing countries but in China these problems occur on an unprecidented scale. In fact, the very size of these problems is such that they cannot nessisarily be addressed simply by scaling up the traditional solutions. But let's put these problems aside and look at another way in which China is a significant exception and which seems to me to have a greater potential to truly upset the internal order of Chinese society.
It is often observed that there is a high degree of correlation between economic and social progress. In the developed world, times of rapid social progress tend to coincide with periods of economic prosperity (take, for instance, the civil rights movement in America which occured during the post-war boom years of the fifties and sixties). Perhaps more importantly, this relationship holds across changes in place as well as changes in time - countries with higher degress of personal and civic freedom tend to be those with higher levels of economic growth and development.
I once came across a "golf course theory of global conflict" which proposed an inverse relationship between incidence of golf courses and of war, which is to say that countries with more golf courses tend to go to war less often and almost never go to war with other countries with a lot of golf courses. Of course, this theory is intended to be somwhat humourous, but it bears out quite well in fact. This is essentially because golf courses are a pretty good proxy for large amounts of leisure and therefore for a high level of economic development, as well as for Westernization. So in other words we could simply say that rich Westernized countries don't go to war very much and almost never go to war with each other.
We could similarly posit a "gadget theory of social freedoms" linking the number of new electronic gadgets purchased by the average person every year to the relative level of social liberties in the society. In this case, gadget purchases are effectively standing in for purchasing power, which is in turn highly correlated overal prosperity (both in terms of income level and income growth). The reasons for this are potentially complex. Economic growth is often assumed to depend on market freedoms as well as on adequate and fair policing; these in turn tend to either cause or result from a free and just society. In The Moral Concequences of Economic Growth Benjamin Friedman proposes the converse, that growth tends to make people happier and more willing to extend help and privelages to others, especially because growth tends to make job competition less fierce by making it easier to get ahead.
Regardless of the reasons, we expect countries with growing prosperity to also expand both personal and civil liberties. By both Friedman's formal comparison of growth rates and my own informal counts of cell phones and MP3 players, this trend seems to bear out. Look at Korea for example: in the South, more and better cell phones and commesurately expanding social liberties; in the North, no cell phones, no freedom. By both of these standards, however, China stands as a major exception; it stands for many practical purposes as the exception.
Why is China such a significant exception? To answer this question, at least in part, we should first look at a time when China was not such a big exception. During the 1980s, following the exconomic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping, China did in fact appear to be on course to expand social and political freedoms as well. Over the course of the decade, there was a continuing push-pull between the progressive and conservative wings of the Chinese Communist Party; first they would give more freedoms, then they would decide they had gone too far and take some back. Overall, the result of this was as sort of "two steps forward one step back" that ultimately was making a slow sort of progress. This was, of course, until the events at Tian'anmen Square.
As pundits like to predict, the gradual liberalization of China brought increased calls for further liberalization. In 1989 this took the form of pro-democracy demostrations by students in Beijing. This type of mass movement made the government very nervous and ultimately led to a major crackdown. Since the crackdown, students have been very wary of demostrating against the government, although in the past several years there has been a steep increase in the number and degree of protest from other segments of society (especially farmers). The received wisdom is that Chinse students were faced on the one hand with the threat of severe crackdowns if they continued to make demands of the government and on the other hand with the prospect of an increasingly promising economy and job market; in this context, they made the obvious choice.
In other words, the CCP discovered that at least a temporary way out of the pressure for liberalization was to make sure that the bulk of students were upwardly mobile and therefore had an invested interest in the maintenence of the current social order. So long as the educated classes remained content with making money, they would not make other demands upon the state. The rest of society, for its part, is easy to keep isolated and unable to form a united movement by the simple policy of inducting any overly ambitious or capable individual into the party structure. As long as the protests remain rural and disconnected, the CCP's control of the state and its resistance to liberalization is safe. If the expanding educated class starts to see lessining prospects for upward mobility, then the Party may be in trouble and China may cease to be the exception. There are some signs that this trouble is on the horizon.
I have to go to class. I will post part 2, with my 3 anecdotal revelations and what i view as their concequences as soon as I get the chance.
Thursday, April 6
Beer Island
I'm currently sitting in an internet cafe above the train station in ZZ waiting to catch my train to Qingdao, home of China's most famous brewery. The city is also home to some supposedly nice beaches and colonial architecture from when it was part of the German concession. Mostly I'm going to get away from the college for a long weekend. Some incomplete thoughts I've been having recently, in many cases influenced by a book G and G sent me on the moral concequences of economic development.
I tend to agree with the book's basic premise that people tend to be much happier to liberalize society when they seem to be getting ahead. In fact, as the author, who's name I can't currently recall, points out that people's attitudes tend to be much more affected by the changes in their economic status than its level as such. This seems to bear out quite well. He points out that when people are more likely to look at what they have compared to what they used to have or what they have compared to their neightbors than they are to simply look at what they have when assessing their prosperity. This has some good concequences, it also has some negative ones. I think most of these are fairly obvious. One thing that I have noticed in China, which was also pointed out in the book, is that people's "neighbor's" is a loose concept which is growing to encompass much more than the peopel that live next door. In fact, people increasingly judge their wealth relative to people in other parts of the country, or even in other parts of the world. This phenomenon creates some really interesting nonsense in China in that the middle class here, and often the wealthy as well, do not consider themselves middle class. Why not? Because to them middle class does not imply the people around the median income for China, it means the middle class that they see in America. So they are not middle class until they have a 3-bedroom house and two cars, which in China is in fact rediculously wealthy. This strikes me as a problem.
Pursuit of economic growth does seem to me to be a worthy goal in general. In particular, this has taken a form in my mind that implies technological progress. I have developed a bit of a fetish for technological progress recently because increasingly I think that advancing, rather than voluntarily scaling back, technology will better solve environmental problems. Oil, in particular, is a big environmental and political problem that can be greatly reduced or eliminated if the right advances are made in science and technology. Alternative fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen cells, alternative fibers (to replace plastic), alternative sources of heat and electricity are all somewhere in the development pipeline. Clearly further focus on technological development in general, and especially a focus on these will be of great environmental benifit in addition to boosting the economy and (according to Moral Concequences) further the liberlization of society. Am I wrong in viewing this as such a panacea?
One thing that China has made me much more scheptical of, however, is the converse of Moral Concequences thesis, the somewhat more frequently stated concept that economic progress and functional capitalism is imposible without a liberal democratic government. It remains to be seen weather China can emerge as a real economic power beyond just a big producer and market for cheap things, but thus far the government is certainly not becoming any more liberal than it needs to be based on the largely political demands of its trading partners; changes in its politics have yet to be spurred very much by economic demands.
As a final teaser, I'd like to advance my theory that people's political stance is based as much on their sense of aesthetics as it is on any consistant moral or economic position.
I tend to agree with the book's basic premise that people tend to be much happier to liberalize society when they seem to be getting ahead. In fact, as the author, who's name I can't currently recall, points out that people's attitudes tend to be much more affected by the changes in their economic status than its level as such. This seems to bear out quite well. He points out that when people are more likely to look at what they have compared to what they used to have or what they have compared to their neightbors than they are to simply look at what they have when assessing their prosperity. This has some good concequences, it also has some negative ones. I think most of these are fairly obvious. One thing that I have noticed in China, which was also pointed out in the book, is that people's "neighbor's" is a loose concept which is growing to encompass much more than the peopel that live next door. In fact, people increasingly judge their wealth relative to people in other parts of the country, or even in other parts of the world. This phenomenon creates some really interesting nonsense in China in that the middle class here, and often the wealthy as well, do not consider themselves middle class. Why not? Because to them middle class does not imply the people around the median income for China, it means the middle class that they see in America. So they are not middle class until they have a 3-bedroom house and two cars, which in China is in fact rediculously wealthy. This strikes me as a problem.
Pursuit of economic growth does seem to me to be a worthy goal in general. In particular, this has taken a form in my mind that implies technological progress. I have developed a bit of a fetish for technological progress recently because increasingly I think that advancing, rather than voluntarily scaling back, technology will better solve environmental problems. Oil, in particular, is a big environmental and political problem that can be greatly reduced or eliminated if the right advances are made in science and technology. Alternative fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen cells, alternative fibers (to replace plastic), alternative sources of heat and electricity are all somewhere in the development pipeline. Clearly further focus on technological development in general, and especially a focus on these will be of great environmental benifit in addition to boosting the economy and (according to Moral Concequences) further the liberlization of society. Am I wrong in viewing this as such a panacea?
One thing that China has made me much more scheptical of, however, is the converse of Moral Concequences thesis, the somewhat more frequently stated concept that economic progress and functional capitalism is imposible without a liberal democratic government. It remains to be seen weather China can emerge as a real economic power beyond just a big producer and market for cheap things, but thus far the government is certainly not becoming any more liberal than it needs to be based on the largely political demands of its trading partners; changes in its politics have yet to be spurred very much by economic demands.
As a final teaser, I'd like to advance my theory that people's political stance is based as much on their sense of aesthetics as it is on any consistant moral or economic position.
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