Читать книгу An Introduction to Intercultural Communication - Fred E. Jandt - Страница 127

Deng was credited with saying, “To get rich is glorious.” The trademark of capitalism, a stock market, was established in 1990 in Shanghai, the most open and cosmopolitan of China’s cities. The post-Deng era has been one of state capital expenditure to expand the economy through production and exports. Exporting was promoted as the way to economic growth. In 25 years, China moved from a low-income, state-planned economy to a capitalistic, market-oriented economy with improved living standards for hundreds of millions of its people but at the cost of extreme environmental damage. China’s challenge as it moves from a developing country to one with a large middle class is to manage that change economically and politically.

Overall, China is the world’s second-largest economy (with $14.6 trillion nominal gross domestic product [GDP], compared to $21 trillion GDP for the United States). The Chinese economy has had strong annual growth. Estimates vary, but the International Monetary Fund’s projections in its World Economic Outlook are that China will soon become the world’s largest economy. China is now the world’s second-largest importer and the largest exporter. Walmart is the largest single importer from China. In 2001, Walmart alone bought $14 billion in merchandise from China; by 2013, it was $49 billion.

China’s rapid economic growth has had major environmental impact. One day in October 2013, in the city of Harbin, which has a population of 11 million, one index measuring particulate matter registered 1,000 on a scale that usually ranges from 0 to 500. The World Health Organization’s recommended maximum is 25. Visibility dropped to 10 meters (33 feet). Several years ago, when the U.S. Embassy in Beijing began issuing pollution readings, Chinese media accused the ambassador of meddling in the country’s internal affairs and attempting to embarrass the Communist Party. Earth system scientist Steve Davis, of the University of California, Irvine, points out, though, that some of the responsibility for China’s pollution results from the demand for goods from the United States and Japan (Brenan, 2014).

Air quality is a major problem in Chinese cities.

Associated Press/Getty Images