Ready or not, here comes China

One excursion does not make me a China guru, but I can report with some confidence that when it comes to economic growth, Wong is right. China is walking in our shoes — and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

On my trip (which you can read more about at Openleft.com), I’ve seen America circa 1900: coastal metropolises of towering wealth hemming in a polluted and destitute heartland. Two Chinas, as John Edwards might say — one you constantly hear about and another hidden from view.
In Hong Kong, I gaped at the sleek office towers, fine restaurants and nouveaux riches — the “miracle” endlessly celebrated by the New York Times’ Tom Friedman (China is a place of “wide avenues, skyscrapers, green spaces, software parks and universities”), Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria (“China’s growth has obvious and amazing benefits for the world”) and most of America’s Very Serious Commentators. Indeed, according to MIT’s Yasheng Huang, China’s best-known cities are adept at tricking incurious observers into portraying the entire country as “sanitary … largely free of grotesque manifestations of poverty (and) one of the most successful countries in tackling income inequality.”

Of course, in Guiyang, a coal-mining town of 3 million in China’s poorest province, I found exactly the opposite — the darker side of the “miracle.”

Here in the countryside is the soundstage of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick — filth-covered tenements slapped together with crumbling cement and kitchen tile; limbless paupers with burned faces begging for food; an atmosphere choked by soot, exhaust and the stench of human excrement.

If we just sit back and listen to those who pooh-pooh “necessary evils” and celebrate supposed “miracles”; if governments refuse to strengthen international environmental policies; if the world merely hopes for the best as 1.3 billion Chinese pursue old-school smokestack industrialization, then there’s not going to be much of a world left.

Salon