SOME REFLECTIONS ON CHINA

SOME REFLECTIONS ON CHINA

A LAND TOUR 

This land tour of a small section of China from Beijing to Zhongzhou to Suzhou to Hangzhou to Shanghai over ten days will probably be most memorable for the physical effort that was required to complete the tour. It reminded us how much we appreciate the convenience of seeing the world by cruise ship where everything is taken care of, particularly the management of suitcases.

Despite that, we are both pleased to have experienced the highlights of the tour and to have gained a more nuanced view of this emerging superpower and its extensive history. We often say that our indigenous population in Australia is one of the longest continuous isolated cultures of some 60,000 years; but in the long evolution of our species, both Neanderthal Man and Homo sapiens found their way to China many thousands of years earlier. This is an ancient land in terms of habitation of mankind and in terms of its language and culture. In contrast, a distinctly Australian culture, largely based on Western traditions, is only some 230 years old and we are still trying to confirm our real identity.

MASSIVE CHANGE

Historians have documented the enormous change in China over the past few generations; but we have personally witnessed it as well. We recall very early visits to Hong Kong and Shanghai when the streets were filled with rubbish, when outdoor markets were covered with flies, where the popular culture involved spitting on the streets, where very few owned vehicles, when the Govt first began forced reclamation of houses, when the highways to nowhere were being constructed and when the first skyscraper apartments and buildings were mushrooming, when the now world famous Pudong District across from the Bund was being constructed. The change is massive. What is most striking is how orderly and tidy everything is. The traffic is busy and occasionally jammed, but no horns blowing like in Vietnam. We travelled to cities of 24 million and to ‘small’ cities of 10 million. One of our guides indicated that the largest city is not Shanghai but a city in central China with over 30 million. As Australians, we have difficulty comprehending such big numbers; but we should remember there are 240 million Indonesians on our doorstep.

POPULATION GROWTH

Of course, the burgeoning population caused the Govt of China to introduce its one-child policy. This was a radical step for a country with a long history built on the significance of family and respect for parents. Families were typically large and males were valued to work the farms and to support the family. With the advent of the one-child policy, some wealthy individuals ignored it and paid the substantial fines, baby girls might meet an untimely end, and if the prospective parents were advised their foetus was female, they might arrange an abortion. The authorities cracked down on all these issues by increasing fines, charging parents who disposed of girls, and made it illegal for doctors to divulge the sex of the pregnancy. 

However, there is emerging some worrying aspects to the impact of China’s one-child policy. It requires an average birth rate of 2.1 children to replace or maintain a population. (The additional .1 accounts for loss at birth or early childhood) When two parents are replaced by one child the outcome can be dramatic. From the very interesting text: EMPTY PLANET , Australia’s average birth rate is 1.8. If we are to continue to grow our economy we must rely on immigration, permanent and temporary. Like China, Australia is particularly vulnerable to falling birth rates. This text suggests that within 30 years China’s birth rate will plateau and then fall dramatically. Consequently China has relaxed its one-child policy, but as we saw with one of our tour guides, having a second child impacts on the earning capacity of one-child families and many are not responding to the relaxed rules. This will be a tricky area for the Chinese Govt to negotiate.

Current Birthrates: EMPTY PLANET – Bricker and Ibbotson 2019

Sth Korea 1.2

Spain – 1.3 current population 47 million to fall by 5.6 million by 2080.

Japan 1.4 to decline by 25% over 35 years 

Thailand 1.5

China 1.6  (In 1960 – 6.2; 1979 – 2.5) – One Child Policy

Australia – 1.8

Brazil 1.8

US – 1.9

India   2.1

Malaysia 2.1

Mexico 2.3 (Religions may play a role in pushing up fertility rates)

Philippines  2.6

Egypt – 3

Israel - 3.1

Palestine - 3.1

Malawi -4.9

Ghana – 4.2

Afghanistan – 5.3

Iraq – 4.6

Niger – 7.4

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WATER INFRASTRUCTURE 

Another glaring feature of China is its focus on infrastructure. That began with the first building of canals diverting water to drier areas in the third century CE and later to the building of the Grand Canal to open up a north-south route. Although millions perished in the process of building this infrastructure, the outcome has been transformational in terms of building China’s economy and communication over the centuries. Towns and cities grew up around the Grand Canal and its tributaries. 

Let’s just make a quick comparison with Australia’s efforts to manage its precious water!

The Murray Darling Project now appears to be an unmitigated disaster from which recovery cannot be certain. When you let politicians control difficult decisions of water management and sharing, rather than depend entirely on empirical advice from experts, corruption will follow. When you allow political interference in the building of dams, inferior outcomes follow. If ever a country needed to get its act together on the management of scarce water resources, it was Australia. Successive Govts have failed this test. China’s massive three dams project completed in recent years, is an example of a Govt identifying a problem and resolving it. Yes, it is an authoritarian approach perhaps less encumbered by environmental restrictions and other Govt Legislation; but these are serious matters that should always be governed by independent advice rather than by the political impacts of tough decisions.

VERY FAST TRAINS

The very fast trains infrastructure in China, from what we saw, was impressive. Yes, I know we do not have China’s deep pockets, but decisions about big projects like this are about deciding priorities among presenting choices. Would it matter if we asked the French to build one less submarine, or perhaps purchase three fewer fighter planes from the US, or use the billions given to high income earners in tax cuts for infrastructure instead, or take advantage of historically low interest rates and borrow the funds without the scare tactics of ‘great big debt’. Again, successive Govts have talked about such a project and done nothing. We need a Grand Line for very fast trains running north to south through regional eastern Australia with tributaries into capital cities and coastal towns to open up regional Australia. Where was this vision when we were flush with rivers of gold from the mining boom of the Howard years. Again, this was largely spent on tax cuts for political advantage

THE ENVIRONMENT 

There was no discussion of dangerous climate heating on this tour so I can make no reference to China’s policies on climate change. What we can say is how impressed we were with a clean and green China for the areas in which we travelled. Our two very fast train trips took us over hundreds of kilometres through both farming areas and high rise rise construction and our bus journeys along highways witnessed obvious planning to fringe these roads with thick vegetation. I did pick up a news item where China criticised Australia for its weak policies for reducing carbon emissions. But so much of that could be raw politics following the Pacific Nations Forum and it tells me nothing about China’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions. 

China was known as the land of the bicycle and we did see plenty of those including lines of rental bicycles as we have in Brisbane. But what was interesting were the number of electric scooters - not the ‘Lime Scooter’ types - but the Vespa motor scooter size that were all electric; we never saw a petrol driven motor bike. They were very quiet and came up behind you unexpectedly

I have personally found the ‘debate’ very frustrating over the past decade about the reality of climate change and about its potential to seriously damage life on this planet. We have been warned about its growing threat for more than fifty years by the scientists. In every other field of science we have embraced its research with a scepticism that was rational. Show us your findings empirically, demonstrate how extensively they have been peer reviewed, show us the counter arguments to your findings, define the level of probability that your findings are valid, and what that will mean for life on Earth. And all that evidence has been available to us; and year upon year its predictions from previous years have been found to be conservative as the evidence mounts.

It is right to be sceptical about a theory as serious as this; but it is not rational to dismiss the theory simply by calling it ‘crap’ as Abbott, Kelly, Trump, Bolt, Jones et al have done or to pretend a greater level of scientific knowledge than the scientists by dismissing the theory on the basis that the climate has always had warming and cooling periods over the millennia, we have always experienced heat waves, forest fires, droughts, cyclones and flooding, more CO2 in the air is good for plant vegetation. And a dozen other non-scientific explanations in the sense that the climate scientists have already factored them in to their research models if they would care to examine it. Do they think that climate scientists are unaware of the history of climate change on this planet? Does it need a ten year old to tell them how serious this is?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/18/perhaps-we-need-to-explain-climate-change-to-politicians-as-we-would-to-very-small-children

SUPERPOWER

It won’t be too many years before the Chinese economy will outstrip the US. Currently we continue to hitch our wagon to the US and once again we are sending military assets to support the US in its dispute with Iran as we have done with every dispute/war the US has had on other occasions. We would be ill advised to disregard the significance of this superpower in our region of the South Pacific. The fact that we only seem to be waking up to the reach of its influence says a lot about our complacency as the “US’ Deputy Sheriff” in the region! More than ever, our politicians must develop their diplomatic skills beyond those of the Deputy PM who was unconcerned about the impact of climate heating and sea level rise on the Pacific Islands because “they pick our fruit”.

China is in for the long haul and Hong Kong will ultimately be reclaimed by China. Taiwan will be more problematic given the influence of the US to whom we are so closely aligned. We, in Australia, have some big decisions ahead.