FT columnist David Pilling offers a big picture
perspective on China – “The doomsayers have it wrong about China”. [gated
version]
Pilling wisely notes:
“It is easy to
imagine China’s economic freight train going off the rails. When I came to Asia
14 years ago, many people in Japan, where the economy was then three times the
size of China’s in nominal terms, were predicting precisely that. Surely, they
reasoned, the system must crumble under its own contradictions. …
The conclusion,
however, that the inherent stresses would lead to social chaos and bring the
system crashing down was born of wishful thinking. It underestimated the
Communist party’s achievements in bringing tangible improvements to the lives
of hundreds of millions of people. It underestimated, too, the strength of its
patriotic message: that, after more than 100 years of humiliation, China had,
finally, in the words of Mao Zedong, “stood up”. Instead of collapsing, by some
measures China has gone from strength to strength. Its output is more than
twice the size of Japan’s. In purchasing-power parity terms, it overtook the US
last year, making it the world’s biggest economy. In just 15 years, its gross
domestic product per capita has jumped from 8 per cent of the US level to 25
per cent.”