Wed, Jun 23, 2010 page8

• Taiwan must brace for crisis in China

  • By Wang Wen-cheng 王文誠
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  Following the US subprime mortgage meltdown and Europe’s sovereign credit crisis, talk of global hegemony shifting to Asia keeps cropping up as a perennial hot topic. Recent events at Taiwanese-owned Foxconn’s factories in the Pearl River Delta, however, have thrown a bucket of cold water over China’s model of vigorous growth, sending shivers down some people’s spine and setting off renewed fears of a global crisis.

  The idea of “hegemony” implies that a certain worldview has turned into a dominant force. Often the dominant idea is spread through cultural channels and the education system. It seeps through any available cracks to influence thinking in every sphere and to guide people’s lifestyles.

  Based on this definition, however, is global hegemony really shifting?

  Since 1979, when China first started reforming and opening up, radical capitalism has taken hold under the guise of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Over the last two decades, China’s economy has grown at an astonishing double-digit or near-double digit rate year after year. China’s GDP has already overtaken that of the UK and is catching up with that of the US. The irony is that China has wholeheartedly adopted the hegemonic capitalist values of Britain and the US.

  The events at Foxconn take us back in time to the scenes of labor observed by Karl Marx in the textile mills of Manchester 165 years ago and evoke Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times which, 74 years ago, presented biting satire of factory conditions with its portrayal of a self-alienated worker tightening screws on a production line.

  Marx described in detail how workers inevitably lost the ability to control their work, their lives and themselves. Unable to realize the value of their own lives, proletarians could only exist according to the values demanded by the bourgeoisie. Production-line workers became nothing more than cogs in the machine, alienated from their fellow workers, from the products of their own labor and from themselves. Now this same process of alienation is underway in China, today’s “factory of the world.”

  With regard to young people today, it is hard to believe the caricature that they are like strawberries, too tender to bear much pressure. Rather, the Foxconn events were caused by social conditions. While striving for economic growth, the state has not given young people the chance to see the value of their own lives. From their position on the production line, the outlook of young workers is unclear and they see no future for themselves. The social conditions that surround them are not ones under which they can decide their own futures and realize their human potential.

  It follows that the problems at Foxconn can’t be fixed by paying higher wages. Giving employees a 120-percent pay raise is a tactic of capitalists. Internally, the company is laying down even greater conditions on labor, while externally it maintains a kind of economic monopoly. The value of labor keeps falling as China’s price inflation continues apace. Meanwhile, other Taiwanese entrepreneurs with investments in China will likely move to locations where they have greater control over labor conditions.

  The fire ignited by the Foxconn events marks only the beginning. The Chinese state has given full rein to a marauding form of capitalism that has led to environmental exploitation, waste of resources, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, inflation, strikes and other specters of capitalism haunting the country. Just like the crises that have hit Western countries in recent years — the oil crisis, subprime mortgage crisis, sovereign credit crisis, etc — China is now entering a crisis the outcome of which is hard to foresee.

  Wang Wen-cheng is a ­professor of geography at National Taiwan Normal University.

  TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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