China
The members of the high-tech workforce in China interviewed by Andrew Ross repeatedly described the country’s aggressive globalization as “a win-win situation for both China and the West.” The question that Ross asks in response is this: “But surely there must be some losers?”
I’m just back from the American Studies Association meeting in California where I’d gone to participate in a discussion on Ross’s new book Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade.
Fast Boat should be read as a rebuke delivered to the likes of Thomas Friedman who, in The World is Flat, finds in offshore outsourcing and cutthroat competition the promise of progress and democracy. Ross spent a year in China taking measure of the price that the Chinese people were paying for corporate greed–and what only increases the book’s worth for me is the fact that some of the ordinary folk who populate its pages have mapped their own individual, desperate paths of liberation under overwhelming conditions that they cannot and do not always oppose.
A particularly absorbing chapter of the book was the report–”Mr Tata Comes to Town”–on the Indian companies that have opened shop in China. We learn that Indian and Chinese executives often say disparaging things about each other. (One person describes it as poor neighbors despising each other.) It is striking that both parties deride each other in near-identical terms: each believes that the other group is capable of fine execution of tasks but really limited on issues that demand independence or creativity. Remarkably enough, this is exactly the view that Friedman has of both the Indians and the Chinese. And this is why he believes that the U.S. will still come out ahead.
In other words, Indians as well as the Chinese have internalized what the West believes about us, and we use such judgment to denigrate each other.
P.S. When I got home, I found waiting for me Pankaj Mishra’s article in the New York Times Magazine today, a report on his meeting in Beijing with the Chinese “critical intellectual” Wang Hui. Hui has the same reservations about the free market that Ross does; they both share a need for greater state intervention and support of the rural peasantry and the poor. Wang told Mishra that the dangers of improving the conditions for the majority were very clear:
“If we don’t improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable.”
Pankaj’s article ends with Wang talking to him at their last meeting about China and India. The rise of the two countries had thrown up new challenges and possibilities for the world. Wang said:
“Western societies have been on top for the last two centuries and shaped the world with the decisions they made. China and India will now play equally crucial roles in the new century. But what will they be? I think it is very important for Chinese and Indian intellectuals not just to imitate the West. They have to explore alternatives to the Western model of modernity. Otherwise, the ‘consumer nationalists’ are already saying, ‘America was on top; now we are on top.’… This is not interesting.”
