When China Rules the World полностью

Just over two years later I tried to retrace my steps with a television crew. There was not a single familiar sight I could find. The dynamic chaos had given way to order. There were brand-new motorways, bridges, factories, warehouses, and a lot more cars; and little sign of the juxtaposition of eras that had so fascinated me two years earlier. I enlisted the help of a couple of officials, but as I described the scenes I wanted to recapture on film they shrugged as if to suggest that they lay in the distant past. For me it was just two years ago; for them it could have been a different century. Guangdong, the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping, was well on the way to becoming the industrial centre of China, full of factories, many Hong Kong-owned, making cheap, mass-produced goods for the global market. This is how and where China ’s economic transformation started.

Now Guangdong, just fifteen years after that first volcanic eruption, is turning over a new page in its history. It can no longer sustain its old comparative advantage. Labour has become too expensive, too demanding, the expectations of its people transformed. Its factories are no longer able to compete with those in Vietnam or Indonesia. In 2007 alone, no less than 1,000 shoe factories closed in Guangdong, one-sixth of the total. [421] Their owners are moving production to the interior provinces, where living standards are as low as they once were in Guangdong, if not lower. And in their place, Guangdong is seeking to move up the value ladder, develop its service industries and shift into new areas of production that rely on design and technology rather than the perspiration of its people and the migrant workers from faraway provinces. Shenzhen and Guangzhou, like many cities in Guangdong, now look prosperous and well maintained, a far cry from former days when they resembled China ’s Wild West. Shenzhen may not yet enjoy Hong Kong ’s Western-style living standards, but it has significantly closed the gap. In little more than two decades, Guangdong has gone from the early days of the Industrial Revolution to something not too far short of the less developed parts of Western Europe.

At the time of Mao’s death in 1976, who would have predicted that China stood on the eve of a most remarkable period of economic growth that would entirely transform the face and fortunes of the country? Virtually nobody. It was as unpredictable and unpredicted as another enormously significant event – 1989 and the collapse of European Communism. China had been torn apart by the Cultural Revolution, in which the cadre that had largely steered the party through the 1950s and early 1960s had been vilified and banished by a ‘popular’ coup d’état staged at Mao’s behest, involving the mobilization of tens of millions of young people in the Red Guard. The movement was opposed to privilege – whether by virtue of family history or Party position – and super-egalitarian in its philosophy: a very Chinese phenomenon with echoes of the Taiping Uprising in the mid nineteenth century. By the time of Mao’s death, the Cultural Revolution had subsided and stood largely discredited, but the country’s future direction remained deeply uncertain. The vacuum created by Mao’s death was soon filled by the return of those same old leaders who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm. They were confronted by the economic ravages and political dislocation that were the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, but free at last to pursue their instincts and inclinations, unimpeded by the wild extremes and excesses of Mao, albeit in a situation where the party faced a severe crisis of legitimacy.