I don’t know if I can go as far as some contrarians to embrace the notion that US policy intentionally lifted China out of poverty in a Marshall-plan kind of way. That was indeed the result, but I look to structural causes which range from business interest in the Far East since the days of the Institute of Pacific Relations (which employed Pearl Buck as a kind of cultural consultant) to the fact that Chinese civilization is at a new stage of expansion whereas the US and the rest of the West is in a Time of Troubles verging on consolidation into a Universal State. (The decaying infrastructure here is an inevitable corollary.) You can picture it as a tilted bar which causes economic vigor to flow from the high end (US) to the low end (China). That this was purpose-driven seems perverse at best, albeit short-sightedness can cover the purpose-driven part as obtuse policy-makers and CEOs, smelling advantage and money, send China foreign aid via WalMart. The institutional context makes this behavior seem rational, too, if rationality can be based on blind grabbiness. Unexamined greed aside, an institutional perspective also makes it pretty easy to understand why China chose a coal-fired building binge. This technology is mature, reliable, and cost effective. Green technologies are only starting to become that way. When China chose coal, she knew what she was buying. Unfortunately, she was also buying some of the most polluted cities in history. On the ground it is complicated. Everything is seen piecemeal. A holistic viewpoint would have revealed and avoided this outcome. She had a golden opportunity to do things differently and better. She could have built those sleek new cities powered by the very latest in green technologies. She could have become a global leader in sustainable development. But nooooo! China became the worlds leader in building new coal-fired electrical generating plants. What is especially tragic about this situation is that so much of Chinas infrastructure is brand new. How quickly can China amortize the tooling costs? China is also the worlds largest producer of solar panels so its not like she was completely asleep. If she were to figure out how to create a truly solar society, she would determine the course of human development for at least a century. Most people see China as the oldest continuous civilization on Earth. To add to the confusion created by scholars from Arnold Toynbee to Samuel P. Huntington, I am jumping feet-first into the puddle to claim that we are witnessing the growth of a Chinese II (or maybe III), taking the fall of the Manchu Empire as the collapse of a Universal State followed by a successor-state period (warlordism rather than a real dark age) and then a new genesis. The era of capital accumulation is over; as she takes off on her new S-curve, she confronts the specter of her highly-leveraged credit bubble which threatens to absorb her surplus. She will have to get creative. So should the US. There is something perverse about looking at China during any climate change debate and declaring, Its your fault! Or churlish. After all, the West had a head start in the industrial age; the majority of excess CO2 in the atmosphere was put there by Europe and the US. Now when China decides that it wants a few light bulbs and a TV set in the home of the average Chinese family, we are supposed to forget that. Nonetheless it is undeniably true that, while virtually all of the existing greenhouse gasses can legitimately be labeled Made in the USA or Europe, Chinas recent contributions threaten to push the problem from extremely serious to catastrophic. It is part of the temper tantrum that followed upon the publication of The Limits to Growth. After all, who is the consumer of last resort? The US. Systemic causation means it’s all of a piece. If we ever get over our narcissism, we’ll see it. The problem is that the Bernays propaganda machine has turned American citizens into masturbated lions lolling in their cages.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:40:35 +0000
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