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Problems lurk beneath China’s shiny new surface
December 29, 2006 11:47 AM
Letter from Shanghai
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
Thursday, December 28, 2006
SHANGHAI
The streets of certain districts in Shanghai this time of year have an almost dreamlike quality to them. The dream in question would be that of a prosperous and happy China.
Walk down Nanjing Road at lunchtime and you’ll be treated to sights of finely coiffed and impeccably dressed people, especially women in their 20s and 30s, whose sense of style is as smart as anything you’re likely to see in Tokyo.
Take just one step downscale and stroll Huaihai Road, the city’s second most famous shopping street, on any weekend day and in many ways the sights are even more impressive. There may not be so much polish in evidence, but the people are out en masse and, despite the Chinese reputation for holding on to money, a great many of them are consuming.
At moments like this, the image of a rising China comes into its most compelling focus, and doubts about what the future holds for the world’s most populous nation seem to dissolve amid the hubbub of content consumerism.
Call it the graph paper and ruler moment, when you take the stunning growth rates of China’s last quarter-century and project them merrily forward. There has been a lot of this sort of thing lately, and not just about China, either.
Goldman Sachs helped launch this brave new notional world with a report in 2003 that spoke of the rise of the BRICs, meaning Brazil, Russia, India and China. Collectively, according to the report’s projections, these four incipient powers will enjoy a greater gross domestic product than today’s G-6 nations.
Regrettably or not, daily life in China, even here in this showcase city, offers periodic disruptions to the dream, moments when skepticism is warranted, or better yet, compelled.
These come with the discovery of ad hoc communities of squatters that one runs into here and there during errant wanderings. It even comes on Nanjing Road, where between clumps of newly affluent pedestrians the attentive will spot people in rags picking through the trash for a living. It comes with glimpses of the stooped and deeply wrinkled old ladies who plead for alms at street corners, all but ignored by the vast majority of happy passers-by.
The intent here is not to slight China’s economic achievement, which in the past quarter-century has truly been all but miraculous. The point is to say that so much remains to be done here, including most of the hard work.
China’s outstanding tasks tend to be of the kind that evade quick and simple measurement and will certainly not loom large in the calculations of the graph paper and ruler gang.
The people who inhabit the world’s oldest unitary state have a common nationality, but they have yet to construct commonly held bonds of citizenship, which allow for the sharing of other people’s problems and of each other’s dreams.
Posted at 11:47 AM