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NEWNATIONS BULLETIN 13 APRIL 2011
THE CHINESE CHALLENGE - A WAKE UP CALL
We are pleased to publish a highly relevant and brilliantly accurate assessment of China’s continuing success in not following the edicts of western capitalist convention - the ‘worship’ of the ‘ol time religion’ of the Free Market, and its concomitant downplaying of the role of government. China’s sustained success is not of course a ‘miracle’- the practical ways in which it works are analysed here. The political framework is obviously different to that of western nations, but that is hardly an explanation for their success, given that state controlled economies were the norm in the former Soviet sphere, which were spectacularly unsuccessful and do not compare with the sophisticated Chinese model.
It is a curious aspect of the conventional ‘American way’ where hidebound jargon can determine the policies that in particular, the political right cannot bring to government. The concept of state planning, of evolving macro-economic policies join words like liberal, or even to some government, as mindlessly abusive. With the cold war long gone, it is no longer a competition between opposing economic systems - or if it is, we can easily spot winners and losers. It is just that China has evolved a system of state capitalism which clearly works - compare the year on year results - by combining State directed strategies added to the freemarket approach to running the actual trading operations. We ignore it at our peril because whilst the Chinese have set out on a world scale to acquire a much larger share of world resources, to achieve the living standards they want - comparable to the west - for their fifth of the world’s population, that if successful inevitably means a smaller share for others.
Bryan Gould, a former British Labour Party MP and Shadow Cabinet member, who left politics to become the Vice-Chancellor of a New Zealand University, has a wide spread of experience - his Southern hemisphere perspective of China is particularly relevant, but with his background in British politics and British and New Zealand Academia, he is absolutely open minded in the face of suspect ideologies from wherever they might originate.
The first law of capitalism is to succeed and faced with the self evident success of present day China, it seems obvious that the Chinese way is succeeding whilst the USA and much of the western world is falling behind.
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