SolidarityEconomy.net

This is the second
of two articles assessing
classes and class struggle in China’s past
and present day. Here, David Schweickart,
replies to YiChing Wu’s article from yesterday,
which was actually an earlier exchange between them at the Global Studies Association at Depaul University in 2006.

What’s Wrong with China?

By David Schweickart
Loyola University

There’s plenty wrong with China, as everyone knows.

–The income gap is large and widening–China’s Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, is now larger than the U.S.’s.

–Unemployment is rising as large numbers of state-owned enterprises shed workers, before or after they are privatized.

–There are sweatshops providing the Wal-Marts of the world with cheap manufactured goods.

–Corruption is rampant.

–So is environmental degradation. Consider the comments of Pan Yue, China’s Deputy Environmental Minister, made in a recent interview:

Our raw materials are scarce, we don’t have enough land and our population is constantly growing…. Cities are growing, but desert areas are expanding…. Five of the most polluted cities in the world are in China; acid rain is falling on one third of our territory; half of the water in China’s seven largest rivers is completely useless, a quarter of our citizens lack access to clean drinking water.

With so many things wrong, China must be capitalist, right? Much of the Left thinks so, seeing China hell-bent on self-destruction, a trajectory that can only be remedied by a genuinely proletarian revolution. See, for example, Barbara Foley’s “From Situational Dialectics to Pseudo-Dialectics: Mao, Jiang and Capitalist Transition, ” published in Cultural Logic (2002), or Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett’s “China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle,” a special issue of Monthly Review (July-August 2004) that was subsequently published in book form, or Robert Weil’s “Conditions of the Working Class in China,” a lengthy manuscript now circulating on the internet. (more…)