China is No. 2 |
IT hasn’t come as a surprise for us when China’s chief currency regulator Yi Gang announced that his country has overtaken Japan as the second largest economy, after the US, in the world. For some time leading global financial institutions have been saying so after seeing its spectacular growth. What analysts had been predicting is now officially confirmed. With GDP at about $5 trillion in 2009, China has been clocking in an average 10 per cent growth for the last three decades, a feat no other country has been able to match. When we talk of China, everything will be in superlatives: the biggest, the largest, and the fastest, not to speak of the most populous on the planet. China has come a long way from Mao’s peasant revolution in the 1940s to an industrial revolution in post-1980s. In the process it has fought many ideological battles to lay the ghosts of communism to rest and embrace capitalism, tailor-made for its needs. The Chinese political model, rightly called communist-capitalism, with traces of authoritarian rule and remnants of socialist principles of state control over personal freedoms and rights, has delivered phenomenal economic results unseen in history. The momentum with which the country is steaming ahead, it is expected to overtake the US in another 15 years from now.
The No. 2 position has its own rewards, but they come with a tag that carries responsibility. In the international arena, China’s wealth-creation is an awesome story; its billions of investments in the US have helped it ride the economic crisis; its massive aid programmes to African and Latin American countries are a source of relief to impoverished people; and its millions of tonnes of imports of raw materials from the four corners of the globe to fuel and sustain the growth rate are pumping money into the global monetary system. Surfing on such goodwill, Beijing shouldn’t allow its image sullied. When it is an economic giant, the world looks forward, and expects, to seeing it in the same leviathan image in all fields – at home and abroad. The world, particularly the West, can’t close its eyes to or gloss over issues that are sensitive to Beijing. For some years they might have helped it to usher in the kind of reforms Chinese leaders wanted but surely such issues have outlived their utility value. Wealth brings openness, transparency and freedoms. Secretive societies breed negative traits which have no place in a country aspiring to become No.1 economic power.
More importantly, China has a long road ahead to catch up with the advanced countries in per capita income levels. At $3,800 a year, a fraction of Japan’s or America’s, it has to see the enormous wealth the country is generating percolates down to the rural masses, factory workers and other low-paid wage earners. The recent agitations for higher pay in some factories are a case in point. No doubt, it’s a Herculean task to uplift millions of people from poverty. But when the rich-poor disparity grows to unbridgeable lengths, so is the chasm in society which does not portend well for any country.
Oman Tribune
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