by Alex Evans | Sep 18, 2011 | East Asia and Pacific
China is not Egypt, Libya or Tunisia. As the Pew Global Attitudes project noted in March this year, only 28% of Egyptians were then ‘satisfied’ with their country’s direction, down from 47% a few years earlier; whereas in China the figure was 87% in March, up from 83%.
So why, asks James Fallows in last month’s The Atlantic, is the Chinese government so clearly freaking out about protests this year and the risk of a “Jasmine Revolution” – when the protests clearly don’t add up to a national movement? As he puts it,
Why … has the government reacted as if the country were on the brink of revolt? Do the Chinese authorities know something about their country’s realities that groups like Pew have missed, and therefore understand that they are hanging by a thread? Or, out of reflex and paranoia, are they responding far more harshly than circumstances really require, in ways that could backfire in the long run?
Fallows sets out the pros and cons for each view. Here are some snippets to set out the first camp’s rationale:
Those who think the government has good reason to be worried say that the accumulated tensions—political, economic, environmental, and social—of China’s all-out growth have reached an unbearable extreme. By this interpretation, the seeming satisfaction of the Chinese public is a veneer that could easily crack. “If one were to read only the Party-controlled media, one might get the impression that China is prosperous, stable, and headed for an age of ‘great peace and prosperity,’” Liu Xiaobo himself wrote, in an essay shortly before he was arrested. (The English version, translated by Perry Link of Princeton, will appear this fall in a collection of Liu’s essays and poems, No Enemies, No Hatred.) He continued:
Not only from the Internet, but from foreign news sources as well as the internal documents of the regime itself—its ‘crisis reports’—we know that more and more major conflicts, often involving violence and bloodshed, have been breaking out between citizens and officials all across China. The country rests at the brink of a volcano.
By June of this year, a wave of bombings, riots, and violent protests at widely dispersed sites across the country illustrated what Liu was warning about. The trigger of the uprisings varied city by city—ethnic tensions in some areas, beatings by police or chengguan in others—but they added to a mood of nationwide tension. “With rampant official corruption, inflation, economic disparity, and all sorts of social injustice and political tensions, the threat to the CCP rule is very much real,” Cheng Li, who grew up in Shanghai and is now a specialist in Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution, told me this summer.
The second camp’s rationale, on the other hand, which Fallows tends towards himself:
…that the situation in China is indeed tense—but that it has always been tense, and that so many people have so much to lose from any radical change, that the country’s own buffering forces would contain a disruption even if the government weren’t cracking down so hard. The main reason is that for all the complaints and dissatisfactions with today’s Communist rule, there is no visible alternative—in part, of course, because the government has worked so hard to keep such alternatives from emerging. This is a less satisfying side of the argument to advance. You look worse if you turn out to be wrong, and it seems unimaginative to say that an uneasy status quo might go on indefinitely. Still, it is what I would guess if forced to choose.
I asked Chas Freeman what he made of China’s current turmoil. He is a former diplomat who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his visit to China in 1972 … Freeman said that he takes seriously the complaints about economic inequality, ethnic tension, and other potential sources of instability. But, he said, they remind him of conversations he had when living in Taiwan in the 1970s, before Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang party had moved from quasi-military rule to open elections. “People would say they are corrupt, they have no vision, they have a ridiculous ideology we have to kowtow to, but that no one believes in practice,” he told me. “And I would say, ‘If they’re so bad, why don’t you get rid of them?’ That would be greeted with absolute incredulity.” Taiwanese of that era would tell him that, corrupt or not, the party was steadily bringing prosperity. Or that there was no point in complaining, since the party would eliminate anyone who challenged its rule. The parallel with mainland China was obvious. A generation later, Taiwan had become democratized.
Of course, Freeman’s analogy only holds up if you think that China will indeed manage to follow Taiwan’s record of “steadily bringing prosperity”. And that’s why, unlike Fallows, I tend towards the first camp. I noted last month that there are already weak signals of the arrival of “jobless growth” in China. And more broadly, I think China looks in bad shape to manage a whole range of global threats that will shape its outlook – just like the United States.
I’m not an expert on Chinese internal politics, so I won’t attempt to guess how all this will play out domestically. But I do see good reasons to question the wisdom of relying on steadily increasing prosperity. As for the lack of a “visible alternative” – surely we’re not going to assume that as a guarantee of stability after the year so far in the Middle East?
by Alex Evans | Sep 17, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity
Simon Kuper in this weekend’s FT Magazine about where the state of the climate change debate now stands:
When someone offered me a trip to India, I said, “Definitely.” A couple of years ago I’d have fretted about the carbon emissions. But like almost everyone else, I have given up trying to prevent climate change. We in the west have recently made an unspoken bet: we’re going to wing it, run the risk of climatic catastrophe, and hope that it is mostly faraway people in poor countries who will suffer …
Rich countries now have a semi-conscious plan: whatever happens, we’ll have the money to cope. We’ll build dikes, or pipe in more water from somewhere else, or turn up the aircon if it gets too hot. Our model is the Netherlands: the country below sea level protects itself against flooding through a network of dams, sluices and barriers. This costs about €45 per Dutch person per year. The Dutch think that even as climate change raises sea levels, their defences can cope for another four centuries. By then there’ll be new technologies.
In short, rich countries will buy protection. If they need to abandon vulnerable cities like New Orleans or Venice, they will. The bigger problem is for poor countries. If Bangladesh floods or Nigeria dries up, they probably won’t cope well. But then our mental health in the west is built on not worrying too much about what happens to Bangladeshis or Nigerians.
Pretty much the long and the short of it – except that he should have added that we’ve decided to screw our children as well as the poor.
by Claire Melamed | Sep 14, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Just before I went off on my long summer break (very nice thank you), I did a podcast on the Guardian website about population. It’s well worth listening to – there’s more than just me on there, including some clips from a family in Uganda which set out very clearly the pros and cons of having lots of children from the individuals’ point of view. But these were my main points for the discussion:
- Even if you do think that population growth is a problem (which I don’t necessarily), then it’s one that is quietly solving itself. In 1960 the average woman had about 5 children, while in 2005 she had less than 3 (data from UN). Nearly half the world’s population now live in countries where the population is steady.
- There’s absolutely no evidence that future population growth will be a problem for humanity as a whole. Of course collecting evidence about things that haven’t happened yet is problematic. to say the least. But, unusually, history is on the side of the optimists here. People have been regularly predicting doom and gloom from population growth since Thomas Malthus first wrote about it in 1798. They have all been proved conclusively wrong. People today are healthier, happier and longer lived than Malthus could possibly have imagined. There is no reason to think that today’s doom-mongers on population will fare any better.
- Climate change is not a population problem. It’s a consumption problem. People in rich countries, where population is static or falling, consume many hundreds of times more carbon than people in the poor countries where population is still rising. Let’s start with the problem we have now – consumption in rich countries – rather than worrying about some hypothetical future when everyone in Mali has a washing machine and two cars. I can’t wait for that day. But I am also sure by then that the technological landscape will look quite different (driven partly by changing market incentives resulting from high oil prices). Really, if you’re worried about climate change there’s quite enough real problems to tackle now rather than agonising about hypotheticals long into the future.
- Population growth doesn’t cause famines. Lack of food is a political problem – it’s not too many people in Somalia that’s causing the famine, it’s apalling government, violence and corruption. In fact, globally per capita food production has been rising steadily since the 1960s, and in Africa since the 1980s (according to the FAO’s data). It’s true that sometimes individual regions become unable to support their populations – because of drought or even, sometimes, local population pressures. But then people up sticks and move, as they have always done through many centuries. Global population policies really aren’t the point here.
- Population growth doesn’t cause poverty. All the talk about rapid population growth in poor countries might make you think that they are more populated than rich countries. In fact, most poorer countries have much lower population densities than rich ones (World Bank data), even if their population might be growing more rapidly. And it’s when people move to cities, to areas of high population density, that development really takes off. Changing demographics do affect development – but not necessarily negatively. In some countries falling fertility rates are potentially allowing for a boost in growth as there’s a large number of young adults without too many dependent children to care for, while in others falling population is a problem, leaving large numbers of old people with too few younger relatives to care for them. It all depends.
This debate makes me pretty angry. Arguments that go on and on in the complete absence of any evidence or data have that effect. And sometimes there’s a nasty tinge of blaming people for their own poverty. But – there is a huge problem with population growth, and that’s if it’s not wanted by the people who are actually having the children. Population is a women’s rights issue. If women don’t have access to contraception and abortion to control their fertility then individual lives can be limited and blighted by unwanted and dangerous pregancies and by the financial and practical difficulties of caring for a big family. So there are some very good reasons to worry about population, and to scale up aid for family planning – but, really, a coming population apocalypse is not one of them.
by Andy Sumner | Sep 12, 2011 | Africa, Economics and development, Global system
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the UN Poverty Targets – are just a few years away from judgment day – 2015 – so it’s a pretty good time to ask how are they doing – especially as people start to think about a new generation of MDGs or MDGs 2.0. In fact how the world fares on the current MDGs may well determine if there is even a second set.
A new report out this week from Ben Leo and Ross Thuotte using the latest available data (see interactive maps here and data excel here and paper here and country-by-country graphs here) outlines where countries are. The key findings this year are:
– Overall, low-income countries’ progress toward the highly ambitious MDGs improved modestly this year while middle-income countries’ performance declined slightly because of a deterioration in the Middle East and North Africa.
– Low-income countries improved this year, on average, on four core MDG target indicators: extreme poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDs, and water. Performance declined modestly for three core MDG indicators: education, gender equality, and child mortality.
– Among low-income countries, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Niger produced the most dramatic improvements this year. For middle-income countries, Mexico and Uruguay exhibited the most dramatic improvements. Honduras and Ecuador remain tied for the best performing countries. Others in the top 10 achievers include – not surprisingly – Brazil, China, and Vietnam and surprisingly (perhaps?) are – Cambodia, Egypt (erm… and Tunisia did well last year on the MDGs), El Salvador and Sri Lanka.
However, the authors note that:
– Widespread data revisions or retractions affected a number of countries’ MDG Progress Index scores, particularly in relation to the education indicator. This effect highlights the practical limitations of attempting to track annual MDG progress and the sensitivity of performance trends to often poor, non-static data sources.
Erm… oh dear – just a few years away from judgment day (2015) and the data is subject to ‘widespread revisions’ ? eg 31 of 67 countries with data revised their data for the education MDG.
And about a quarter of countries countries don’t have a baseline to judge if specific MDGs are met.
As debates on MDGs 2.0 begin what are the implications of the above? Maybe chose targets for data that exists at the outset (ie the baseline) so one can judge if the targets are met?
All of this is a bit worrying of course because data matters not only to wonky geeks – but how can one judge any kind of results without a full set of data? (and one that isn’t subject to substantial revisions year-to-year…).
