Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
mercy of a boss who can fire you if he doesn't like your nose.” Then,
echoing the optimism of the former capitalists, the students declared:
“Come back in a few years and you will see the superiority of socialism.”
(Bernstein 1982, 71)
Now, nearly 30 years after these discussions, one may well ask if the
optimism of Bernstein's friends in the early 1980s was warranted. To
be sure, China is now much more economically developed than it
was in 1981, but the gap between rich and poor is increasingly larger
now. (In fact, this gap is greater in China today under the Communists
than it was during the Nationalist period under Chiang Kai-shek.)
Unemployment and job security are now economic issues that Mao's
command economy never faced. Some Chinese workers, particularly
miners and textile workers, are driven like slaves in very dangerous
workplaces. Rich people have access to the best health care, and
poorer people with serious illnesses are often simply left to die.
Chinese cities are vastly wealthier than the Chinese countryside. The
coastal provinces of eastern and southern China are much more eco-
nomically developed than the hinterland provinces. All in all, the
spectacular inequality of wealth distribution in China today would
have shocked Sun Yat-sen.
Is China still a communist or even a socialist country today? Outsiders
have been asking this question since the early 1980s. Many commenta-
tors and observers have their doubts, and the views expressed by British
journalist and writer Jonathan Fenby are typical:
Is China still socialist, as Hu Jintao proclaims? The predominance of
market economics, lack of social care, pollution, recurrent food scandals,
growing wealth disparities and illiteracy that is estimated to have risen
by 30 million people in five years argue otherwise. At the end of 2008,
new high school history textbooks in Shanghai cut the text on socialism
to one short chapter out of 52 while giving a single sentence to pre-1978
Chinese Communism and making one reference to Mao. The workers in
whose name the CCP claims to rule have lost out. Encouraging output
through market mechanisms has proved a lot easier for this authoritar-
ian system than defending its citizens from the adverse effects of
growth. The Maoist “iron rice bowl” welfare safety net is gone. The
World Bank estimates that the share of wages in the PRC's gross domes-
tic product dropped from 53 per cent in 1998 to 41 per cent in 2005
(compared to 56 per cent in the USA.)
China's leaders still call themselves Communists, but what does
this mean for them?
How can followers of Communism privatize
on an enormous scale, throw millions out of work at state enterprises,
...
