The Harperites come to terms with China’s reality
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
April 18, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT
BEIJING — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is stubborn. Everyone knows that by now.
Those who work with him report that it takes a lot of arguing before he might change his mind. Even then, he doesn’t give people the satisfaction of saying he actually has changed. It just comes out in new policy directions without any admission of change.
So it now is with the Harper government’s attitude to China. This week, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day was wandering around China like a Conservative Marco Polo seeking audiences. It was the longest time any Conservative minister had spent in China.
Mr. Day had been one of those China finger-pointers inside the Harper cabinet. He used to tell others about China’s awful human-rights record and talk very tough about the Chinese. This week, he was touting trade, smiling for the cameras and announcing for the third (or was it the fourth?) time the opening of new Canadian trade offices in China, something the previous Liberal government had promised.
Later this year, Mr. Harper himself is supposed to visit China, something he pointedly refused to do for the Beijing Olympics – an omission widely noted in the Chinese government and commented on during the opening ceremonies on Chinese television.
Finally, if belatedly, the Conservatives are coming to terms with the reality of China, not the rather one-dimensional view they developed in opposition and brought with them into government. They are also arriving at the elementary conclusion that had long ago dawned on all sentient observers of the world: China is hugely important.
Conservatives, on arriving in office, were a group with many MPs favourable to Taiwan (having taken freebie trips there courtesy of Taipei), others infused with a sense of moral goodness, others possessed of an evangelical fervour about nasty Communists, and almost all ignorant about China. What little they knew, they knew with certainty; what they didn’t know, they cared not to know.
Worse for them, China was a place the Liberals had cared about – like Africa. They were Conservatives and, as such, were going to focus on other places that were not so Liberal, such as South America and India.
This sounds ridiculous, of course, but such was the puerile partisanship of Conservative politics and their stunning ignorance of the world. They were going to be different, not because they understood how or why but for the sake of being different. Last fall, the Canadian International Council held a fundraising dinner in Toronto with China as the theme; when asked what he thought of the affair, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty muttered to someone that there’d been a lot of “Liberal” ideas in the room.
It has taken the better part of three years for the toxic mixture of ignorance, ideology and certainty to confront the reality of China’s importance and the counterproductive irrelevance of the government’s attitude.
The whole world wants China’s attention these days – which is what money can buy for a country – and if a country such as Canada doesn’t, well, that’s Canada’s choice. The Chinese couldn’t give a damn, to which a certain number of Canadians who dislike the Chinese regime would reply: We don’t give a damn, either.
That regime certainly has unlikeable elements, including an intolerance of public dissent, an authoritarian government, a muzzled press and Internet, a toleration of corruption and a foreign policy that involves supporting thuggish countries. But China has never once been anything remotely like a Western-style democracy, and to imagine such a plant growing any time soon in that soil is illusory.
The Chinese people, in the main, are considerably freer today than at any time under their dynasties, warlords, Kuomintang or Communists of the Mao variety – in the sense that more people can enjoy the options of some prosperity and an ability to at least gripe about things, provided they do not call the regime into question. What is happening there, by the standards of their history, is astonishing.
The Chinese helped scupper the last World Trade Organization round. They will be one of the make-or-break countries in this year’s climate-change negotiations. They are the only nation with any influence, albeit not much, over North Korea. They have a Security Council veto. They have reserves of $2-billion and are America’s major banker. They are giving more money to the International Monetary Fund. How they use their reserves is one of the world’s most important questions.
Countries need to talk to the Chinese about these and other matters besides questions of commerce, and you don’t get very far by throwing up human-rights issues all the time. Somehow, a balance has to be found, something the Conservatives are apparently now discovering.
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There’s no business like China business
JEFFREY SIMPSON
April 17, 2009
KUNMING, CHINA — It’s 7:30 Saturday morning in Kunming, a city of about four million people in southern China, and construction workers are already ascending the elevators to resume work on a massive six-building complex financed, in part, by George Soros, or so the sign says.
It’s Sunday in Beijing, and workers who have slept in temporary on-site accommodations, are busy welding, mixing cement and doing a myriad of other jobs on an apartment complex.
Saturday, Sunday, every day, the work goes on in China – where unions are so rare that even party propaganda doesn’t bow to them, where in an ostensibly Communist country there is no nationwide public health system, but where the drive to earn money to send home to families in rural China or to make it into the burgeoning middle class means work at an intensity that we in North America can scarcely imagine.
It is said that the Chinese economy is experiencing a slowdown, that the worldwide recession has even taken its toll here, that as many as 20 million migrant workers who have come to the large cities for work are now without it. Exports have fallen five months in a row through March, bad news for an export-driven economy. Growth of 13 per cent in 2007 and 9 per cent in 2008 might fall to 8 per cent this year, or perhaps even as low as 6.5 per cent.
Everyone else is anticipating no growth in 2009, or minus growth, and China has a “problem” with 6.5 per cent to 8 per cent growth. We should have such a “problem.” And don’t forget that China is sitting on reserves of something like $2-trillion, more than half of it lent to the Americans.
It is the defining economic story of our time: the profligacy of the Americans, the world’s greatest borrowers and spenders; and the Chinese, the world’s biggest lenders and savers. How symbolic it was – and pathetic, really – for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hurry to Beijing shortly after her appointment to reassure the Chinese that, yes, her country remained a good credit risk.
What do the Chinese do with all that money? They use it, for starters, to begin remaking world economic institutions, demanding, quite properly, a greater say in institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. They use it, too, to remind Americans episodically of the debt they owe to China; and they will use it, if necessary, in any protectionist spat the Americans might provoke, given their enfeebled economic position, staggering indebtedness and chronic trade deficit.
They use it, of course, to strengthen China – which is what the massive infrastructure spending across China is all about: ports, trains, roads, airports. And they try to use it to help their people, who, it must be said, have been somewhat let down by the nation’s new wealth.
The gap between the rural poor and wealthy urbanites is quite evident, even to casual observers. The government tries to inject money into the economy, but too many people save whatever they can, because they are not protected by proper pensions or a public health-care system. If the state won’t provide, or insist on, pensions and health care, then people do what logic dictates: They save for both.
We think of China as a place where no one can speak his or her mind – and, to some extent, that’s true. But prisoners of that image might be surprised at the amount of media bitching going on about inadequate health care, bitching from both writers and ordinary people interviewed for news programs. In the government’s stimulus package, something like $170-billion (Canadian) is being spent on health care over three years. Keep in mind, that’s for a country of 1.3 billion. Also ask yourselves what’s been going on if a nominally Communist country doesn’t even have a universal health-care system. Even the Soviet Union had such a system, and Cuba has one.
But back to those workers on Saturday and Sunday, and to that “problem” of 8 per cent growth. It’s now an old observation, but one that too many Canadian businesses still seem to miss and, until very recently, the Harper government dismissed, that China is busy as no country in the world is busy – and, in the process, is changing the dynamics of world economics and politics.
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Shanghai is making up for lost time
JEFFREY SIMPSON
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
April 15, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT
SHANGHAI — On the third floor of Shanghai’s Urban Planning Museum, a display of what the city will look like in 2020 takes most of the space.
Viewers circulate around the outside of the gigantic mockup, with its wooden buildings, designed neighbourhoods, port complexes, rivers. Everything about the display is staggering – its size, presumption, ambition – but then staggering reflects Shanghai, an old city, frozen for decades in time, but now literally bursting at the seams and set to become the next of the world’s great, indispensable cities.
Shanghai will be in this century what London was in the 19th and New York was in the 20th. Think of London’s Crystal Palace exposition in 1851, then think of New York’s World’s Fair in 1939, or the subsequent one in 1964.
Both fairs underscored those cities’ claims to be the greatest at the zenith of their respective countries’ economic power. Next year, Shanghai will play host to the 2010 World’s Fair. If you remember the planning, money and ambition that ignited the Beijing Olympics last summer, you won’t be surprised at what the Chinese are preparing for Shanghai next year.
Anyone accustomed to the mixture of incremental improvement but generalized decay of Canadian cities, or the pleasing but rather stagnant cities of Europe, will be blown away by Shanghai.
There’s so much money that has rushed into, and through, the city that is transforming itself daily. Sure, there is a worldwide economic slowdown, and critics apparently delight in underscoring how it has hit China. Some hit: a growth rate of “only” 8 per cent.
It’s not just the amount of construction that awes, but the nature of it. Cast a look around, say, Montreal or Toronto and ask where the great architecture has gone in private buildings. Shanghai, by contrast, looks like one immense architectural competition, with companies striving to make statements about themselves, the city and their time, with some of the best architects in China and the world.
Not everything will appeal to all tastes, of course. A certain monumentalism in parts of the city is distasteful. But cities with great drive often witness this kind of competition among companies to construct bigger and brassier structures. It’s a mixture of swagger, money and ambition. Remember Toronto’s Golden Age, when the banks competed to build the biggest and best towers downtown, or when the same thing happened in New York.
It’s not all private money, of course, since the government plays a central role in much of Shanghai’s development, from planning to owning land. That corruption has gone hand in glove with this explosion has been documented, although in a society with an authoritarian government and a restricted press, quite likely only a small amount of the corruption has been exposed.
(Lest we get too uppity about such matters, let’s remember the Tammany Hall machine in New York, the other urban political machines, and the grip of organized crime in U.S. cities.)
The government in Shanghai has powers to rezone land, displace people and pursue projects quickly that don’t exist in more democratic societies. Toronto, for example, doesn’t have a rapid-transit line to the airport. Now that one is being contemplated, residents are predictably complaining about the impact on their backyards. In Shanghai, they just go ahead and build the astonishing magnetic train line that takes eight minutes to whisk people to the international airport.
Need rapid transit? Build two sensational, clean subway lines charging passengers about 60 cents, and plan a bunch more. Need a link to the domestic airport? Start building another magnetic train. It’s what you can do with money, ambition and power. Plan not for tomorrow, but for a decade from now and beyond.
Of course, cities are bursting across China – the country has dozens with more than one million inhabitants. None has the geographic location, the financial capital and the drive of Shanghai, the sluice through which so much money runs in and out of China.
Shanghai has lived repeatedly through political turmoil, and who knows if more might come the city’s way? You can see the effect of the latest bout of turmoil: Few, if any, buildings were constructed from the Japanese invasion of the late 1930s through the whole Mao era. Five decades or so of stagnation reflected, among other things, in the city’s building stock.
Making up for lost time, and preparing for the future, is what Shanghai is all about.
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