Lavish parties tend to leave a hangover as the problems of daily life, put aside for the celebrations, come crowding back. China’s Olympic party is not likely to prove an exception. The full legacy of this year’s extraordinary events in the People’s Republic of China will take many years to emerge, but in the short term, a number of pressing problems are clear.
The Olympics, with its political project of displaying China’s power as much to its own population as to the rest of the world, has been the prime focus of domestic propaganda for several years, rallying people behind the nationalist theme with the promise to situate China as a restored power. It worked: Recent opinion polls have reported a strong feel-good effect, with high levels of satisfaction with the government and the direction of the country.
But when the Paralympics closes, the leadership might feel the absence of the mobilizing appeal of the whole event, with its power to galvanize the country’s patriotic instincts and minimize the growing divisions in income, prospects and privilege that are the breeding ground of discontent.
A colder, grayer, post-Olympic world is coming into focus, a world in which most of China’s customers are cutting back on spending, inflation at home is running at least at 10 percent with no relief in sight, eroding the country’s competitiveness, and in which China must face the new challenges of maintaining high growth and social stability with the constraints of limited resources, energy shortages, concern over climate change and environmental exhaustion.
For the past decade, China’s cheap manufactured goods have helped its customers — in particular, the developed economies — to keep inflation low. Now, with its manufacturing costs rising, China is more likely to be a contributor to increasing prices internationally.
Neither energy nor raw materials are likely to get cheaper, and the cost of migrant labor — hitherto the cheap input that has fueled everything from rebuilding China’s cities to servicing its coastal factories — has risen sharply as industrial zones have spread inland and workers have found jobs closer to home. Employees have already made gains in wages and conditions, and many manufacturers, including Chinese firms, are looking at cheaper production sites.
Planners know China’s development model to date, while impressive in its results, is unsustainable: It is too carbon-intensive, too polluting and too inconsistent in its effects. Like every Asian tiger before it, China, the biggest tiger on the planet, has to meet the challenge of moving up the value chain, from T-shirts to high-tech, from low-end production to high-value innovation, from energy-intensive to climate-friendly production.
In recent years the early coastal industrial zones have begun to enter that stage, with waves of factory closures the harbingers of a new phase in the country’s development.
Managing the transition will be a formidable task, and a race against the clock. It will demand action on the distortions created by the expensive energy subsidies that militate against efficiency and other anomalies in China’s hybrid economy, all at a time when real incomes — the source of much of the satisfaction registered with the state — are being squeezed.
Meanwhile, time is running short in other ways: the future pensions and labor headache of the world’s most rapidly ageing population; an acute water crisis and a gathering health bill from chronic air and water pollution — these are only the most conspicuous items on the list.
A recent report found 70 percent of the villages surveyed in north China facing increasing water shortages, with ground water falling rapidly and agricultural production being severely constrained. Two-thirds of the cities, too, are short of water. A World Bank report censored by the Chinese government cites air quality as causing more than 600,000 premature deaths a year.
The great efforts to clean up Beijing for the Games allowed the city’s residents to rediscover the lost pleasures of clean air. But the emergency measures that proved necessary in Beijing cannot be sustained. A longer, nationwide cleanup is urgent or the cumulative costs — in health, lost production and environmental damage — will be huge.
There is potentially another unintended consequence of the Olympics. Millions of people around the world watched a display that presented China as modern, powerful, energetic and rich. The opulence of the ceremonies, the magnificence of the venues and the sheer scale of Games were designed to impress and will have changed the perception of China for many, precisely as the government intended.
But China is also engaged in the global negotiations for the post-Kyoto regime, and its participation is essential if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. Like other developing countries, China is pressing the developed world to finance its move to a low-carbon model, an unprecedented deviation from business as usual for a country at China’s stage of development. Under the Kyoto principle of the polluter pays, developed countries — which are responsible for most past emissions — acknowledge this obligation, but it was never going to be easy to persuade skeptical taxpayers to deliver.
Before the Olympics, for most Western taxpayers China was a huge and rapidly developing country of which they knew virtually nothing. After the show, the abiding impression is not of the poverty that continues to afflict much of the nation: Those images of deprivation in parts of China that do not measure up to the dream were not on view.
Any nation wants to present its best face at such a time, but it may prove counterproductive. If China is rich enough to stage that show, Western taxpayers may ask, why do they need our money to pursue a track of clean development? Western politicians struggling to make the case for the kind of radical resource transfers required may find themselves wishing the Olympic party had been just a little less opulent.
Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue.net
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
Having lived through former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s tumultuous and scandal-ridden administration, the last place I had expected to come face-to-face with “Mr Brexit” was in a hotel ballroom in Taipei. Should I have been so surprised? Over the past few years, Taiwan has unfortunately become the destination of choice for washed-up Western politicians to turn up long after their political careers have ended, making grandiose speeches in exchange for extraordinarily large paychecks far exceeding the annual salary of all but the wealthiest of Taiwan’s business tycoons. Taiwan’s pursuit of bygone politicians with little to no influence in their home
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
Despite calls to the contrary from their respective powerful neighbors, Taiwan and Somaliland continue to expand their relationship, endowing it with important new prospects. Fitting into this bigger picture is the historic Coast Guard Cooperation Agreement signed last month. The common goal is to move the already strong bilateral relationship toward operational cooperation, with significant and tangible mutual benefits to be observed. Essentially, the new agreement commits the parties to a course of conduct that is expressed in three fundamental activities: cooperation, intelligence sharing and technology transfer. This reflects the desire — shared by both nations — to achieve strategic results within
RSS