|
Recently, while commenting on the authoritarian direction China has taken in recent years, Bernie Sanders balanced his criticism by praising China’s achievement in overcoming poverty. He said:
Indeed, when China became the world’s second largest economy, passing Japan, in 2010, it received accolades from many quarters for its achievement in overcoming poverty.
As Joshua Muravchik recently acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal,
That same observation has been made frequently, including almost certainly by the four most recent presidents of the World Bank, myself included. And the new president, David Malpass did so almost as soon as he assumed office.
However, as Muravchik also points out,
Also striking, however, is that when China’s economy came to equal Japan’s in nominal terms back in 2010, it had taken Communist China some 61 years to catch up to Japan in total size (or 49 years if you prefer to use 1998, the year that China overtook Japan in Purchasing Power Parity terms). Considering that China’s population was more than ten times that of Japan, simple arithmetic meant that after 61 years (or 49 years) of communism, China’s per capita GDP was still just 10 percent that of Japan’s, although it would have been churlish to point that out at the time of China’s great triumph and few people did.
Some might say that this comparison is unfair, because China didn’t really start to grow until Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in the early 1980s. But that’s really just another way of saying that China under Mao’s communism did more to impoverish an industrious and entrepreneurial people than any country in the history of civilization (to use the Sanders superlative) — although adjusting for size there are no doubt others with equally dismal records, Zimbabwe and Venezuela quite possibly among them.
As China shows signs of turning back to the communist ideology that makes the Party the source of all authority, it is worth recalling the damage Mao did with his “Great Leap Forward” —known in PRC parlance as “The Great Famine” or the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” (And more recently as the “Three Years of Difficulties.”)
Yet there was nothing natural about that manmade disaster, nor is there anything natural about the impending change in China’s family structure, which is largely a result of Deng Xiaoping’s rigid “one child policy” which only a totalitarian regime could impose on a “family-centric culture” like China’s.
Derek Scissors, in his excellent analysis of “China’s economic ‘miracle’ in context,” compares China’s “miracle” to those of Japan and Korea. He points out that “China is far behind Korea and Japan 40 years into their respective ‘miracles,’” and that “China’s miracle has faded prematurely, leaving the country far from rich and with little prospect to become so.”
In other words, even with a favorable comparison that focuses on China’s “miracle” years, its achievement in reducing poverty, while considerable in its pure scale, does not really measure up to Sanders’ description of the greatest progress “in the history of civilization.” And, as Xi Jinping asserts more pervasive control and more ideological Party authority, it is important not to forget that the putative “efficiency” of such dictatorial systems has to be weighed against the colossal mistakes that only they can make, like Mao’s three decades of despotism which took China back a generation.
Recently, while commenting on the authoritarian direction China has taken in recent years, Bernie Sanders balanced his criticism by praising China’s achievement in overcoming poverty. He said: “What we have to say about China, in fairness to China and its leadership, is . . . they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than […]
|
