What everyone should know about ... A Quarterly series
The Rise of China B y E va P a u s
When the twenty-ninth Olympiad opens in August, the eyes of the world will be on China. The country’s phenomenal economic growth will impress some observers; others will see the dramatic increase in inequality and environmental degradation that have accompanied it; and others still will be deeply disturbed by the government’s poor human-rights record, most recently the crackdown in Tibet and China’s support of the Sudanese government. But whichever element of the Chinese story we might find most salient, all of us must recognize that China, for better or worse, will alter profoundly the global geography of wellbeing and power in the twenty-first century. How the Chinese government deals with its growing internal challenges, and how the rest of the world understands and responds to China’s rise, will shape the world’s future stability and prosperity. To promote a better understanding of these critical questions, the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives focused this year’s Global Challenges Conference on the rise of China. [For more information, see www.mtholyoke.edu/global.] Leading up to the conference, five faculty members team-taught a course on the subject for more than 100 students from across the disciplines. Here are some of the key characteristics and implications of the rise of China we explored and the vexing questions we need to answer. Inside the Chinese Dragon In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated a set of economic reforms that unleashed high economic growth and a vast
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improvement in the standard of living for many Chinese. In twenty-five years, output per person increased more than eightfold, and hundreds of millions of Chinese moved into the middle class. The percentage of the population living on less than $1 per day dropped from more than 60 percent at the time of Mao’s death in 1976 to less than 20 percent today. At no time in history has a large country grown so much for so long, reducing the number of destitute so quickly. An incredible achievement! On the flip side, the distribution of income has deteriorated substantially, generally in favor of the city versus the countryside, coastal areas versus the interior, and the South versus the North. The Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality (with ‘1’ capturing perfect inequality and ‘0’ perfect equality), rose from .32 in 1980 to .47 in 2004. An incredible increase! China’s high economic growth has also resulted in dramatic environmental deterioration. Indeed, economic growth would be much smaller—some think negligible—if we factored in environmental costs. Because China meets 70 percent of its energy needs with coal, and because much of its production is extremely energy inefficient, China now emits as much carbon dioxide as the United States! (See chart.) This is simply not sustainable. Political change has lagged far behind economic change in China, as the Communist Party has maintained control over political decisions. But demonstrations in China have been increasing rapidly, with rising demands for greater government accountability, workers’ rights, human rights, rule of law, and environmental protection. Will the Communist Party be able to maintain its authoritarian stance in light of rising protests? Can it become open enough to accommodate the genuine demands for participation?