Who’s afraid of the new China?

NOWHERE are the contradictions in the new China more apparent than in the contrasts between the countryside and Beijing. In the Chinese capital city, the old hutongs (narrow streets) are rapidly being demolished to make way for new high-rise condominiums. The gleaming “bird’s-nest” national stadium designed by a team led by the noted Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron will be the centerpiece of the 2008 Olympic Games this August. A six-lane highway is one of many roads that criss-cross the city.

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But in the neighboring province of Hebei, old farmers work the land and live in modest houses without sinks or even running water. Ever since the communes were dismantled in 1978 and most state-owned industries were “corporatized,” the gap between the rich and the poor has widened.

A farmer earns about 2,000 yuan from his crop while a Beijing-based insurance manager can net up to $50,000 a month.

These are among the impressions of the participants of a 10-day China exchange program that was organized by Akbayan party-list group, Bangkok-based think tank Focus on the Global South, and other civil society organizations.

The above photos were taken by Agrarian Reform Now coordinator Ernesto Lim Jr., a member of the delegation that visited China last May 10 to 19.

“The disparity between the urban and rural population is glaring,” says Alice Raymundo, coordinator of the Integrated Rural Development Foundation.

Raymundo adds that the farmers they talked to missed the “good old days” under former Chinese premier Mao Tse-tung. It was during this time that large swathes of agricultural lands were collectivized, with other portions left to state enterprise. After the communes were dismantled, says Raymundo, the peasants were left to fend for themselves, and the benefits that they had gotten from the communes disappeared with the onset of privatization.

Now, each peasant is allotted 700 square meters of land, a farm lot that Lim says is no bigger than a backyard garden.

View Lim’s slide presentation.

Visiting Hebei, the group also noticed that most of the rural population are old. Aging couples, observed Raymundo, raised their grandchildren while their children worked in urban centers.

China’s growing appetite for land and other natural resources is fueled by its booming economy. As its farmlands are converted into condominiums and industrial projects, the Asian behemoth has begun looking beyond its borders for food and other resources.

Last year, the Philippines and China signed 19 agreements reserving 1.24 million hectares of farmland for use by the Chinese, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In March, Akbayan party-list representative Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel pointed out that, aside from the controversial national broadband network deal bagged by the Chinese firm ZTE Corporation, the Philippine government had also entered into 31 other “questionable” agreements with China.

The agreements covered trade, cultural protection, mass transportation and customs cooperation, and include 19 agribusiness deals that Hontiveros-Baraquel denounced as “patently unconstitutional and inimical to Filipino interests.”

Aside from these, China and Chinese firms have also been involved in numerous controversial deals in the Philippines: multi-million loan projects rejected by the World Bank, joint marine seismic undertaking agreements in the disputed Spratly Islands, and the North Rail contract deemed illegal and disadvantageous by legal and transport experts of the University of the Philippines.

From a Philippine perspective, these deals are skewed in favor of China. But what’s scary, say the China exchange program delegates, is that the Chinese people don’t see it this way.

When told of the agricultural agreements, some Chinese responded, “We will need the land as our farmland is being converted into housing.”

Focus on the Global South research associate Herbert Docena says that a Central Party Committee school director told him that “in order to achieve future prosperity for everyone, we should maintain and expand some things which have traditionally been regarded as exploitation.”

“So (there are) no apologies anymore,” says Docena, who notes how many analysts have explained China’s turn to the market after 1978 as not the result of being drawn to capitalism as an ideology, but because it saw this as the route or the way to national wealth and power. This explains why the new China is not exactly a new liberal state, as it remains under very strong rule.

“It’s a state that wants to harness the market for its own national power,” Docena says.

Some of the destructive effects of following a Western model of growth are already apparent in China. On their way to visit farming communities, the delegates saw one denuded mountain after another. China also has been beset by water problems and desertification.

Too, the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympics has been shadowed by worries of massive pollution. This has already led a top marathon runner (who happens to be asthmatic) to withdraw from the marathon, citing health concerns.

“The way they achieved their growth is it’s really at the expense of their workers and the environment,” says Dorothy Guerrero, a research associate of the Focus on the Global South’s China Programme.

She says that although China was able to collapse a hundred years of industrialization into only 30 years, the problem such leapfrogging has dealt to the country is equal to a century of industrial transition.

Docena, meanwhile, cites World Bank statistics that show that China was able to decrease the number of those subsisting on less than $1 a month from 490 million in 1981 to 90 million in 2004.

But at the same time, he says, the country’s Gini coefficient jumped from 0.33 in 1980 to 0.47 in 2004. Some estimates place it as high as 0.5. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality in a country, and the closer it is to one, the higher the inequality. Last year, China had the second highest Gini coefficient in Asia, after Nepal.

A recent Asian Development Bank report says that the the largest contributor to increases in inequality from the mid-1980s to 2004 may have been the difference in rural and urban incomes.

“Other countries like India and South Africa [want] to learn from China and we’re saying, please don’t,” says Guerrero.

“All of us, I think, left China feeling very scared,” says Akbayan lawyer Jae de la Cruz. “Because you have Chinese footprints in Asia, in Latin America, in Africa. How do you check on that?”