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November 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
The government has a clear strategy: that domestic consumer growth should take
up the slack that is left by the reduction of exports. Yet this transition
will be far from easy to make. The emergent middle class may be 300 million
strong and growing, but (in an echo of the complaint of many of their
western counterparts), huge proportions of its income is taken up by paying
for property, not least since the government insists on a large deposit to
try and dampen the property price boom. (A nice but hardly luxurious flat in
Beijing can easily run to half a million US dollars.)
At the other end of the scale, the migrant labour population is now some 200
million people who do not even have the right of legal residence in the
cities where they are building the skyscrapers that have created the
metropolises of glass cliffs that amaze visiting dignitaries.
The state runs hot and cold on their status. Prime minister Wen Jiabao spoke
up publicly for them in 2010, saying that they would have to be regularised
(and this would mean an adjustment of the residence permit system).
Yet even this summer, private schools to educate the children of migrant
labourers were being shut down. If these aspirant buyers can¡¯t be brought
into the system, another huge slice of society is taken out of the
government’s economic model.
The massive cost of health care, perhaps the single biggest expense after
housing, is yet another curb on discretionary spending on travel, clothes,
or entertainment.
Over the past four decades, the Chinese leadership has been bland and
bloodless, with the extraordinary rise and fall of Bo Xilai being the
exception. It has been this way because Deng Xiaoping planned it to be so,
concerned to reshape Chinese politics so that a charismatic and destructive
leader such as Mao could never reappear and seize power as he did during the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
It is no coincidence that the successive leaders in the 1990s and 2000s have
mostly been engineers – the stolid Li Peng, and the unreadable Hu. (The more
mercurial Bo Xilai was one of the few to have studied history at
university). Yet the injection of technocratic engineers into a
non-pluralist system has been both a boon and a disaster.
The ability to engineer wide-scale social change has coincided with rapid
economic growth. Yet these engineers’ tendency has been to see this as a
neat and predictable process. Input x amount of labour and capital and get
result out of the other end. But the messy reality of China defies the
engineers’ blueprint.
And it’s unclear that leaders who are dependent on technocracy above all have
the creativity to work out what happens if things start to go wrong.
It’s not all gloomy. China has plenty of inherent advantages. It has a high
literacy rate (95 per cent, over India’s 75 per cent). Also, while its
people’s aspirations have greatly expanded in the past decade, they still
don’t match the fuel and resource hungry standards of the west. (Though they
don’t have to, to cause huge environmental damage.)
But there is no doubt that the aftermath of the 18th Party Congress will be a
balancing act of proportions that even a leader as skilled – and ruthless –
as Mao or Deng would have found hard to cope with.
*Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at
Oxford University.
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