The young Chinese businessman, asked what he desired most now that he had his new apartment, closed his eyes and breathed, slowly and fervently, the word ”Honda”. Heard a decade ago on a trip to southern China, it was an incantation summing up much of what is contradictory and unresolved about personal aspirations in China, the country’s longterm ambitions, the future of its people, and the nature of western investment in the Peoples’ Republic.
The British industrialists and financiers who accompanied Tony Blair on his Far Eastern travels are players in the great drama of the Chinese economy, as are leading businessmen in all the advanced states. That economic drama is also unavoidably a political one, particularly as the Chinese regime is fixed on the formula of rapid economic growth and firm political control as the two mutually reinforcing elements that will ensure its continued existence.
Yet there is one simple problem about mass consumption in China, which is that it cannot work beyond a certain point, if western standards of such consumption- and they are the only ones we seem to know — are to be applied.
The head of the UN Environment Programme, Klaus Topfer, said at a meeting in Australia this month that the Chinese aim of quadrupling the size of the economy in the next 20 years was unsustainable. China does not have the resources needed for such an expansion, and nor, in many resource categories, does the rest of the world. If China wanted to have the same number of cars per head as Germany, Topfer said, it would have to produce or import 650-million vehicles. So much for the ”Honda” prayer, since there is not enough metal in the ground to build such a fleet, nor enough oil to fuel it.
We have been hearing stories like this about China for 20 or 30 years, including the predictions about its potentially impossible demands on the world’s grain supplies. It is also true that grain yields may soar, and that cars in 20 or 30 years’ time may not be made of metal or fuelled by oil, or that a prosperous China might be able to avoid the perils of creating a car-owning society on the same scale as America or Europe without suffering adverse political consequences. And yet, while events often do not bear out worstcase predictions, the difficulties associated with Chinese economic growth are obvious.
Politically, the problem is that, with or without more formal democracy, managing a society displaying such a bewildering array of up and down winners and losers as China does today is a truly taxing business. Assuaging successful groups who have lost ground or who are not advancing as swiftly as they had expected may be as hard as coping with those who have suffered from economic change or who so far have gained little from economic growth. And, if the standard of living achieved by some of the population cannot be generalised to the majority, because of resource and environmental constraints, the strategy of growth plus control in the end must fall.
The Chinese government, with the left side of its brain, is looking at ways to reconcile growth with such constraints, and weighing policies that might enable it to avoid the pollution, waste and environmental damage that development has brought in other countries. But, with the right side of the same brain, it pursues the older objectives of big industry, big army, mechanised agriculture, huge water development schemes, and western material standards for its citizens. In this schizophrenia, it is not too different from other countries, but the scale in China is so immense that failure would have global consequences.
The party, meanwhile, acts swiftly to suppress discontent or opposition whenever it takes an organised form, even if that opposition is as indirect as that represented by the Falun Gong movement. Falun Gong is not Chinese religious life at its best. But the older faith traditions of China, also mistrusted and sometimes persecuted, should ideally be drawn on by its rulers rather than excluded as potentially subversive. For one thing, they teach moderation. Sun Shuyun’s fascinating book, recently published, on the 7th century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang is also a reflection on her own life, that of her family, and on the choices made by modern China. She recalls the Maoist saying ”However much we can dream, the land will yield” which was, depending on point of view, a bold statement of determination or a foolish defiance of nature.
Her relatives were literally flung this way and that across China, their lives disrupted and their happiness compromised, in pursuit of the unreal ambitions of the Chinese state and party at the time.
”We were told,” she writes ”that when everyone’s material wants were satisfied, we would all be happy. It did not occur to me to doubt it; we were lucky if we were not hungry. I did not know that Buddha’s path is called ‘the Middle Way’, avoiding the extremes of luxury and deprivation.” China, it might be argued, is in as much need of the wisdom of the Middle Way as it ever was.
The political crisis in Hong Kong is, at one level, a special case because of the territory’s unique status and the ”one country, two systems” promise which China made in 1997 and which many Hong Kong people feel it threatened to break by the introduction of new security laws. But, at another, Hong Kong is representative of the range of restive and discontented communities in China. The Hong Kong protest was not only about the security laws but about the poor performance of the man picked by China as chief executive, about unemployment, mishandling of the Sars epidemic, inadequate progress toward a fuller democracy and, more broadly, the city’s relative decline since its incorporation into China.
In this last respect, the problem is one of the slippage which may, in time, affect many of the regions which did well in the early stages of the Chinese economic miracle. They can only retain their prosperity if they are very well governed indeed.
That ideal combination of freedom and efficiency which people in Hong Kong want is also sought elsewhere in China. It may be that an authoritarian state which has banked on achieving legitimacy through prosperity can, in the end, decide on limits and reconcile its citizens to those limits without provoking upheaval. Yet, although democracies are not very good at restraining human desires, it would seem there is a better chance of making decisions that will be accepted if they follow wide and free discussion of the objectives, advantages, and disadvantages of different forms of economic development. And perhaps the Buddha is a better guide than a Honda to the best future for China.
Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud by Sun Shuyun, HarperCollins – Guardian Unlimited Â