Читать книгу The State of China Atlas - Robert Benewick - Страница 9

The 2008 beijing olympics represented an important statement by an emerging regional and world power. China is culturally, economically, linguistically and politically relevant to the global community. It is a huge, complex and contradictory geo-political entity that has taken its place in our collective consciousness on its own terms. Nonetheless, China still remains mysterious to many people. Media spectacle, commerce and extended trade relations do not entirely counteract the unknowability of profound difference. So how is China known in the contemporary world? Whilst, in the international imagination, China is bound up in extravagant symbols of development and capital, its minority peoples and most of its provinces are hardly known. Most people think of the “centralizing kingdom” (zhongguo), as it has been conveyed through classical art, Tang poetry, revolutionary meetings and the killings in Tiananmen protests of 1989, through to sparkling business districts in Shanghai, the spectacular historical epics of films by Zhang Yimou, and the woeful faces of Sichuanese survivors and their rescuers during the earthquake of May 2008. In media reports, China is either a friend or a foe. It is power or money, suppression or great courage. Sometimes it is a flood, the earthquake, demonstrations, or sporting valor. China remains seemingly unknowable, because – in getting to know China – the West must recognize the limits of its assumptions, and that challenge is too hard in our own state of chronic transition and global discomfort. China is intrinsically bound up with the world’s future, but its powerful national sentiments will mean that this mutual future has to be negotiated, not presumed. This is the great value in understanding the world through the state of China. Almost every day we read that China is among the top trading nations; that its economy is one of the world’s largest; and that it is one of the nations attracting the most direct foreign investment. As if this is not enough, China has become one of those powerful national economies with reasonable cash reserves, it is the government that could decide to de-invest from the USA and watch the leader of the free world go down in a whirl of debt. There is much to trumpet, even to celebrate, and we can marvel at China’s successes. Even on an ideological level, leaders of western nations derive a certain satisfaction since many of China’s economic achievements can be credited to the market-led reforms that began in 1978. This may be a dominant perspective but it is not the only one. As is the case for every nation the reality is more complex. There is no doubt that most citizens in China are better off than they ever have been. Many are richer than before. An alternative perspective, however, takes into account that although there have been impressive inroads into poverty alleviation many millions remain desperately poor; a new entrepreneurial middle class, and along with that an aspirational working class, is emerging, but the income gap between each socio-economic segment is widening. A welfare system is being developed, yet healthcare remains beyond the reach of most citizens; the ageing population will soon become the largest in the world, and they will need care and support. Meanwhile, new graduates with hard-earned college degrees are scrambling to find work. These are examples of the contradictions that confront China’s elitist and insulated leadership. They are problems familiar to other nations, but they are exacerbated by the sheer scale of China’s population, and by the spatial challenges and financial disparities of the country as a whole. China’s population size can be seen as a great resource in a globalizing economy, providing a flourishing consumer market and a bottomless pool of cheap labor to exploit. It is also a source of mounting

INTRODUCTION