Up to 40 million Chinese people still live in caves. That’s more than the populations of Texas and Illinois combined. In fairness, a fraction of these caves are apparently pretty nice, complete with electricity and well-compacted dirt floors. But that’s grading on a curve because, well, they’re still caves.
Meanwhile, 21 million Chinese live below what the Communist party calls the “absolute poverty” line. That sounds pretty good if you have in mind our poverty line, which is just under $11,000 per year for an individual and roughly $22,000 for a family of four. The absolute poverty rate in China is $90 a year, or $7.50 per month. And 35 million live on less than $125 per year. Hundreds of millions of Chinese live on $1 or $2 a day.
Advertisement
Michael Levy, who recently wrote a book on his stint as a Peace Corps worker in rural China (yes, China still asks for Peace Corps help), put it well in an interview with NPR: “Imagine that there’s a country exactly like the United States. Exactly the same size. It’s got the same cities. It’s got the same number of rich people and poor people. It’s just like us. And now add 1 billion peasants. That’s China.”
And yet that’s the country President Obama insists we need to emulate. “Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics,” then-candidate Obama told an audience in Virginia in 2008. “Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”
Obama has returned to campaign mode and his fear-China refrain. To listen to Obama, China’s beating us in some sort of infrastructure race. “Folks in Congress are also going to get a chance to decide . . . whether our construction workers should sit around doing nothing while China builds the best railroads, the best schools, the best airports in the world.”
Maybe we could use more infrastructure spending, but China’s got nothing to do with it. The reason China has invested massively in infrastructure is simply that it has relatively little of it. America has 5,194 airports with paved runways (the only kind I use, how about you?). That’s more than 11 times China’s 442. In fact, you can add up the paved airports of the next 10 countries combined, and America beats them with more than a thousand airports to spare. We have nearly twice the roadways China does and almost three times the railways.
Ah, but China is investing in high-speed rail! Which, we are told, will help us win the future. Except that China has, in the words of London’s Financial Times, “slammed the brakes” on its high-speed rail program for a slew of safety and economic reasons.
Jonah great column, fine work. China's problems are intense and getting worse. When local Christians responded so effectively and quickly to the Sichuan earthquake often beating the government to remote villages with aid the police arrested them. That right they were arrested for helping hurt and starving people. We want to live in China or be China? The minset that arrested these Christians is exactly the same mindset that leads people to leave a 2 year old to die in the street.
An often under reported aspect of the problems that China faces is the fact that so many of the people have been fed so much false information about so many different subjects for so long they don't even grasp how the outside world works.
While in China I saw a Tony Blair interview on a Chinese English language channel. It was a town hall style meeting with educated Chinese. One of the questions they asked was about the London riots. From memory, "Recently there were terrible riots in London and the police acted to shut those protests down. When China had similar riots in Tibet and the police acted to restore law and order the Western Media claimed that China's conduct was authoritarian but they didn't see the London police as authoritarian. Why, Mr. Blair, do you think the Western Media has such a double standard?"
Blair the idiot liberal just mouthed some words about how the media does have bias and then criticized the London protestors. However the incidents were totally different. The Tibetan protestors have nothing to do with the London protestors and the responses of the London and Chinese police were radically different but no one in the room realized that. No one. Sad truly.
Don't fret, the Obama administration is working hard to overturn that. What with Holder's Dept. of Justice throwing out the win in the New Black Panther Party Case and the cover-up in Fast and Furious, the overturning of bankruptcy law when dealing with GM and Chrysler, the NLRB bullying of Boeing, and the Dept. of Energy payouts to unstable "green" companies (to name a few examples), BHO is working to make third-world corruption and "rule by men" the new style for America.
Forget for a moment about the staggering differences between our sophisticated, highly developed nation and the vast sewer with a few glitzy escalators that is China. (Right now, an unmanned Chinese spacecraft is approaching another, preparing to accomplish China's first docking maneuver. Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott did that in Gemini VIII back in 1966.)
Each morning we wake up in breathtaking freedom. In China, the boot of tyranny lies softly on the neck of each Chinese citizen, ready to crush with suffocating pressure the moment the wrong syllable emerges from a peasant's lips.
Sure, we started doing docking maneuvers in the 60s, but as Crusty the Clown would say, "but what have you done for me lately?" Right now they are doing docking maneuvers and we are calling travel agents in Russia to book flights to our own space station.
Shanghai has been transformed over the last 20 years (External Link) while 10 years after 9/11, Ground Zero is still a mess.
Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to trade in my citizenship for a Chinese one, but I do admire their ability to get some big projects done. Daily, I become less sure that the US has that same capability anymore. Whether you blame it on bloated government bureaucracy, environmental regulations, or mounting debts it all adds up to equal a lack of dynamism in our country that grows more apparent each day.
The headline does not put things in sufficiently clear terms. It's not merely that we "need not" envy China: we SHOULD NOT envy China.
--
Jonah writes, correctly, that Obama "mythologize[s] China in order to justify expansion of government," but this is too mild a description of what he's doing. It's the expansion of government at the expense of our liberty, prosperity, and even social stability (witness Occupy Oakland). It's an expansion of government beyond the rule of law established by the Constitution and the mechanisms through which the governed express their will over the government (witness efforts to bypass Congress with executive orders).
The differences between the Left's goals and China's "authoritarian police state" appear to be differences of degree, not of kind.
Both of them having accepted the principle that the liberty of the individual must generally give way to the good of the collective, a frank American liberal cannot honestly draw a bright line between himself and a Chinese communist.
Describing China's problems with poverty is completely pointless and irrelevant! Yes, China is a poor third world country. Half a century ago, it was poorer and less developed than many sub-saharan African countries. But the fact is, China's government--as horrible as many of their human rights abuses and unchecked dictatorial powers are--has pursued domestic policies that have resulted in tremendous economic growth. China has added millions of people to its middle class each year, and has developed faster than just about any large country in the history of civilization. Is there still extreme poverty in China? Absolutely. But the percentage of Chinese without clean water or electricity continues to diminish each decade. China is poor, but they are improving their condition at a far faster rate than we are. India, though far behind, is growing at an enormous rate, showing that such growth is compatible with democracy. Is there vast inequality in these countries? Certainly! But in fact, not much more than in the United States (as far as the gini index is concerned), and certainly much less than in most of Latin America and other poor countries.
The rapid growth of countries like China, India and South Korea doesn't have to do with size of government--it has to do with investing in infrastructure rather than spending on consumption, something that the United States falls behind the rest of the developed world in.
A baby doubles in size in the time it takes a teenager to add a couple of inches. Neither criticizing the teenager as a slacker or praising the baby as an overacheiver is appropriate as their situations are simply different.
Having said that, I do feel American citizens should manage their money better than they do. I don't think the government should be managing the citizen's money at all.
It's a lot easier to play catch up, than it is to lead the pack.
A favorite example of mine.
An American farmer replaces a 20 year old tractor with a new model. He then sells that 20 year old tractor to a chinese farmer who uses it to replace two oxen.
Describing China's problems with poverty is completely pointless and irrelevant! Yes, China is a poor third world country. Half a century ago, it was poorer and less developed than many sub-saharan African countries. But the fact is, China's government--as horrible as many of their human rights abuses and unchecked dictatorial powers are--has pursued domestic policies that have resulted in tremendous economic growth. China has added millions of people to its middle class each year, and has developed faster than just about any large country in the history of civilization. Is there still extreme poverty in China? Absolutely. But the percentage of Chinese without clean water or electricity continues to diminish each decade. China is poor, but they are improving their condition at a far faster rate than we are. India, though far behind, is growing at an enormous rate, showing that such growth is compatible with democracy. Is there vast inequality in these countries? Certainly! But in fact, not much more than in the United States (as far as the gini index is concerned), and certainly much less than in most of Latin America and other poor countries.
The rapid growth of countries like China, India and South Korea doesn't have to do with size of government--it has to do with investing in infrastructure rather than spending on consumption, something that the United States falls behind the rest of the developed world in.
Spoken like a true Progressive. The Chinese haven't a say in what kind of economy they must live under. The CHICOM government keeps wages and benefits suprressed in order to draw-in the businesses of Western nations. But, what have they've done with thier trillions? Why they are borrowing from it in order to build make-work infrastructure projects all over the nation. They've built power stations with no grids, bridges to no-where, and entire cities with no residents. Real estate inflation has forced 5-6 families to share a 800 sq ft appartment, and commodity inflation has driven food prices right through the roof.
China didn't learn a thing from Japan inc. In the 1960s-1980s Japan too kept wages low, savings high, and consumption to a minimum. They too stashed hundreds of billions into thier state banks (via what was then unheard of trade surpluses), which were funneled to "infrastructure" projects and entitlements). Japan, unlike China, was forced to float the Yen. By 1992, its economy was in a tailspin, and it has not yet recovered. China cannot keep thier artificial labor market going forever. They simply do not have the children, and social unrest over long hours and little pay will catch up with them.
And one last thing, since 2005, the US has invested over $1 trillion in "infrastructure". Not sure where you are coming from.
The reason China and India are growing so fast is simply because they are so poor. This same trend happens all over the world. Lifting a nation out of poverty is as easy as building factories and getting kids in school. In developed economies, we have already reached critical mass in those areas. That's why our growth rates hover around 2-3%. There's no miracle here. Eventually these countries will catch up and their growth will more closely resemble ours.
Jonah, I thought that NR types like you and Rich Lowry faithfully believe that Illinoisans and Texans DO live in caves. Isn't that the sort of witty bon mot you glitterati exchange through mouthsful of brie and chardonnay at the weekly soirees?
I kid, I kid! Everyone knows that Beltway insiders actually think Texans live in plywood shacks with no indoor plumbing.
Great column, and I might add in response to Obama's praise of China having the "best schools" that in the USA when we speak of our crumbling schools, it's as a metaphor for lagging test scores. In China it literally refers to tragic building collapses.
Without disagreeing with any of Jonah’s analysis, isn’t there still a big conceptual problem for conservatives? We have always argued that freedom is indivisible. Personal, religious, political and economic freedom go together and support each other – perhaps cannot even be sustained separately. China seems to have decoupled economic freedom from the rest and is still making great economic progress. There may be a billion people who have not yet been touched by that economic success, but it is hard to argue that it is not working for those who have been.
"China seems to have decoupled economic freedom from the rest and is still making great economic progress. There may be a billion people who have not yet been touched by that economic success, but it is hard to argue that it is not working for those who have been."
Yes, China has experienced huge growth recently. But as Goldberg and others point out, the country is still waaaay behind the west, and the political strains inside the country are growing larger, not smaller, over time; apparently those Chinese who do not accept their freedom being "decoupled" are making themselves known, via riots, strikes and even sabotage. . And with the coming demographic downtrend China may have already reached its peak, whatever path it chooses.
I will crib a comment by Chou en-Lai , when asked what he thought were the historical consequences of the French Revolution::
1,338,299,500 people in China in 2010 according to my google search 30 seconds ago. 1 billion divided by 1.34 billion is about .75.
So now let's rephrase what you just said.
"China seems to have decoupled economic freedom from the rest and is still making great economic progress. There may be 75% of the people who have not yet been touched by that economic success, but it is hard to argue that it is not working for those who have been."
That's what you are saying just replacing 1 billion with the fraction of the population.
This is nothing new. In totalitarian regimes (probably all countries regardless of economic/political system), it has always been pretty good for probably 25% of the people who happen to be favored. If everyone was completely beaten down to nothing, there would be nothing to rule. 25% is probably just about enough to keep the other 75% in line and take really good care of the ruling elite, the .1% or .01% that do well in every country on the planet.
Our poor do far better than most of China's top 25%.
Let's get real. The measure of a country is the ratio of people trying to get in vs. those trying to get out. I challenge anyone to find a country with a higher in to out ratio than the US. There might be one, but I will lay good money down that it is not China.
Once again, Jonah Goldberg proves why he's probably the best pundit out there. Because he tells the absolute truth!
Unlike Niall Ferguson, Conrad Black, Mark Steyn, and John Derbyshire ... who, interestingly enough, are all British "ex-pats."
Hmmmmmm ... is there a pattern here? Not trying to be bigoted or prejudiced here, but ...
All these "blokes" have perfected the "art" of contemporary declinism. The USA is finished, they all say rather cheerfully, so when it's TEOTWAWKI time in the States, all they have to do is round up their rapidly depreciating dollars and convert them back to Pounds Sterling!
Give me a break!
Follow
