|
The China of our imagination bears no resemblance to reality.
Beginning with Marco Polo's sojourn in China in the late 13th century, there have been two Chinas — the China of the imagination, as interpreted by Westerners, and the real China as experienced by the Chinese.EFL The financial system is hard to measure because the informal lending market is huge, a result of deformities that make it difficult for anyone other than an unprofitable state-owned enterprise to obtain credit. Many Chinese look at the stock market as a kind of casino, where only insiders make money. Nowhere else in world financial history has a stock market shown such poor returns, with an economy growing at an average annual rate of 10%. Chinese middle-class consumers will force democracy to take root in China. The assumption is that along with their Big Macs and lattes, the Chinese are imbibing the precepts of democracy and free elections. The common assumption among Westerners is that economic prosperity will result in a middle class demanding a political structure that would protect their new wealth. There is not much evidence to support this, other than a proliferation of lawsuits. According to Elizabeth Economy of the Council for Foreign Relations, "So far...the middle class has not organized in any meaningful way to push for wholesale political change." Rest at link...it's tonic to those who think of China as an unstoppable juggernaut. They've got problems, big problems. Floating the yuan would make those problems worse. Despite the fact that this was published in the LA Times, it contains a lot of truth. The writer's website, chinaonline.com Posted by: gromky 2005-05-23 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=119821 |