China 2020: Double and Quadruple Happiness
SolidarityEconomy.net via Toffler Associates
Introduction
Frank Feather is a business futurist, with a remarkably accurate 30-year forecasting track record that often defies conventional wisdom. He is ranked as one of the “Top 100 Futurists of All Time” by Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of the Future. A best-selling author and dynamic keynote speaker, Feather was born in the UK but is now based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has consulted to companies including Ericsson, IBM, Ford, Nokia, and Shell. Continuously since 1984 he has been special adviser to China on economic modernization and market reforms, and he has seen many of his ideas implemented there. He previously worked for Barclays Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank and CIBC.
China’s Growth
China has a remarkable and unmatched 30-year track record of doubling and quadrupling its gross domestic product. In 1978, the country’s GDP was US$147 billion and falling, per capita income was only US$190 a year, and more than 250 million people were living in abject poverty. Adjusted for inflation, the country’s per capita output in 1977 was no higher than it had been in 1957.
Undaunted, China set itself some audacious goals. It aimed to quadruple its GDP between 1980 and 2000, something it had achieved by 1996. It then determined to double its output between 2000 and 2010. Again, the goal was achieved ahead of schedule. The country’s next goal is to quadruple GDP between 2000 and 2020 and to achieve “moderate prosperity.” China’s long-term 70-year goal, laid down in 1978, is to boost its per-capita GDP to that of medium-income countries by 2050, a goal which it will almost certainly surpass before the self-imposed deadline.
Wave-Like Economic Development
China’s overall economic strategy is simple. It is based on the “third wave” concept developed by the futurist Alvin Toffler in his book by the same title, published coincident with reforms in 1980. The book was translated into Chinese and read by every mainland Chinese politician and academic and “third wave” became part of the vocabulary. (more...)
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World's Top Polluter 
Does Communism Work After All?
By Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner, Der Spiegel
China is securing an ever-bigger share of the world market with the methods of a planned economy. Competitors and economists alike are astounded by the country's seemingly unstoppable march to becoming a global economic superpower. The development has left many wondering: Does communism work after all?
Nine men dressed in dark tailored suits meet behind high, Red walls. Their secret meeting place in downtown Beijing is called Zhongnanhai, or "Middle and Southern Lake." Once part of the Forbidden City, Zhongnanhai was a place where emperors, concubines and eunuchs would spend their 
by Jerry Harris
.Starbucks in China’s Forbidden City
Starbucks Forbidden City location has been called an “affront to Chinese culture†in a protest by netizens to get the coffee shop relocated. China has 123 million people on-line where the campaign has found a home on blogs. Writes Rui Chenggang, “This is not globalization but abuse of Chinese culture.â€
. Tesco to use carbon labels
Tesco is a UK corporation and the world’s fifth largest retail chain. It recently announced it will create an index 
by Stephen Philion and Chi Hua*
Robert Weil’s recent (June 206) 
by Sitaram Yechury
At our request, once again, we were taken to one of the relatively less developed areas to see the levels of development and the living conditions there. The delegation spent two days in Guiyang capital city of Guizhou province in China's south west region. As stated earlier, the per capita income here is 1/10th of that in Shanghai province. In terms of natural beauty, however, this is one of the spectacular areas in China with wondrous mountainous formations and spectacular waterfalls. Given this terrain, land for agricultural operations is very difficult to come by. A local saying goes as follows, "it doesn't go more than three days without raining and you wont find more than a square meter of flat land".
Apart from visiting the natural landscape and the Huangguoshu waterfalls (the highest in Asia) the delegation had the 
BEIJING, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- Farmers living on the arid mountains bordering Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan in southwest China are being urged to consider growing a new crop from a local tree. From 2007, the Jatropha Curcas L tree, which grows wild, will be used to produce bio-diesel and prevent soil erosion.
Farmers had traditionally used the tree to contain livestock and its uniquely fragranced seeds provided oil for lamps.
Thanks to a United Nations project, more than 1.3 million farmers in three counties of the provinces with ethnic minorities comprising 45 percent of the population, will be extracting oil from the seeds of the Jatropha Curcas L tree to improve the ecosystem, increase their energy supply and annual incomes.
Entitled "Green Poverty Reduction in China", the 8.58 million US dollar project, jointly established by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Chinese government, is targeting minority communities in ecologically fragile and remote regions of China. 
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. 
classes and class struggle in China's past
and present day. The second, an exchange
with Yi Ching Wu by David Schweickart,
will appear tomorrow.
Yesterday's Class Enemy:
Class Ideology and the Politics
of the Cultural Revolution
By Yi Ching Wu
University of Chicago
It is not so much of an exaggeration to say that the Cultural Revolution was all about class-it was, in any case, officially self-defined as “a great revolution in which one class overthrows another.†The notion of class framed the experiences and practices of hundreds of millions of Chinese people. Class and class struggle constituted the very political framework of the movement, and defined its main objectives. A highly elaborate vocabulary of class pervaded the everyday life of the entire Chinese population. But what did it really mean to talk about “class†during the Cultural Revolution? What was the meaning of “class struggle,†and who were its primary targets?
These apparently innocuous questions have no self-evident answers. In the contemporary Chinese context, the meanings of such political terms as “class,†“class struggle,†and “revolution†have been largely evacuated. They belong to this class of words which, by virtue of having been used so much and so often, have come to mean almost completely nothing at all. Yet these are by no means trivial questions. My purpose of probing the meaning and character of class politics during the Cultural Revolution is to explore two broad questions with regard to the internal complexity as well as the historical significance of the Cultural Revolution. First, in what sense was the Cultural Revolution cultural? And second, to what extent was it revolutionary? 
One day earlier this year I met Wang Hui at the Thinker's Cafe near Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he teaches. A small, compact man with streaks of gray in his short hair and a pleasant face that always seems ready to break into a smile, he arrived, as he would to all our subsequent meetings, on an old-fashioned bicycle, dressed in dark corduroys, a suede jacket and a black turtleneck.Co-editor of China's leading intellectual journal, Dushu (Reading), and the author of a four-volume history of Chinese thought, Wang, still in his mid- 40s, has emerged as a central figure among a group of writers and academics known collectively as the New Left.
New Left intellectuals advocate a "Chinese alternative" to the neoliberal market economy, one that will guarantee the welfare of the country's 800 million 
Vietnam is mentioned in the news quite often these days. But the references are almost always in relation to Iraq. What's not being covered is what's going on in Vietnam itself -- which is unfortunate, because economically, politically and socially, it might just be the most interesting and inspiring nation on the planet.In the interest of full disclosure, my affection for Vietnam goes way back. As an anti-war activist I met with Vietnamese liaisons to the anti-war movement on several occasions. In 1970 I visited Hanoi and was profoundly impressed with the character and resolve of the people, not to mention the beauty of the country itself. Even then, during wartime, the food was terrific, too.
It still is, as I discovered earlier this year when I returned to Vietnam. The people are open, friendly and confident, just as they were before. But now, not only is the war over, Vietnam is the second-fastest-growing economy in the world. (China is first.) The standard of living of millions of people is improving at a rapid pace. 
