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01/08/2005 | China's Mistake: Leaders still behave as communists

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Amazing. In the course of barely one decade, 300 million Chinese have risen from poverty thanks to globalization. The transfer of technology, foreign investment and an intense foreign trade accomplished the miracle.

 

Humanity had not seen a similar phenomenon in all of its history. Never before haa a human mass of such proportion gone from indigence to integration into the social middle class in such a brief period.

We're indebted to Argentine journalist Claudio Escribano for that well-pondered observation. But China's spectacular development could end in the worst possible disaster if its top leaders -- who were, after all, brought up in a dogmatic Marxist rigidity -- persist on the huge mistake of producing as modern capitalists while behaving as old-fashioned communists.

That explains why, for some time now, instead of turning to the market, some party leaders have been touring the world with a checkbook in hand to ''ensure'' that they have the raw materials necessary to fuel a huge economic machinery that grows at an annual rate of 10 percent, raising prices artificially.

It also explains why their military budget has risen to $90 billion a year, the result of an effort to create a dangerous offensive force replete with intercontinental missiles and long-range bombers.

This behavior reveals that the party leaders perceive raw materials as a booty that must be hoarded by powerful nations. It also shows that they have not altogether abandoned the Cold War.

Party leaders still maintain an absurd, adversarial military stance against Japan, Europe and the United States. They are also obsessed with Taiwan, as if that minuscule island of barely 36,000 square kilometers, with 23 million hard-working inhabitants and an annual output of little more than $500 billion, could be a threat to China -- when Taiwan really is a productive source of capital and technology that hugely benefits the continental territory.

China did not learn the lesson of Japan, the world's second-largest economy.

After 1945, Japan's leaders understood perfectly that the secret of sustained development was to cooperate peacefully with the First World on all issues, while competing fiercely in the open market on the basis of talent, creativity, prices and improved quality.

That's because the so-called Western world, to which the Japanese adhered firmly, did not close its doors to any nation that respected the rules of the game, as Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Ireland and a dozen other successful countries proved later.

Within a decade, military experts say, China will have the capacity to militarily confront the United States and NATO, with a chance of winning on the battlefield. And in the sinister calculations made by the strategists, that victory could be achieved with ''barely'' 500 million dead, 100 incinerated cities and 800 million survivors.

What the strategists don't say is what China would gain by reigning over an Earth covered with radioactive rubble. From whom would China buy and to whom would it sell? Where will it find scientific clusters to jump-start progress?

Is it possible that China's leadership, despite its own recent experience, did not realize that the prosperity, development and scientific advances that can benefit its people arise from international cooperation and interconnection, not from the destruction of other societies?

Is it possible that, at this stage in its history, China does not understand that the best that can happen to its overpopulated nation -- one-fifth of all humanity -- is for the other four-fifths (Taiwan included) to be wealthy partners with whom China can multiply all kinds of transactions?

When China's engine of production was communism, it was natural for the leaders in Beijing to cling to Marx's absurdities. But if indeed the leaders have embraced capitalism, they should begin to read Adam Smith seriously before they needlessly destroy the planet on which we all live.

Hacer - Washington DC (Estados Unidos)

 


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