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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryWhat's behind China's space mission?At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Bangkok, China strode forth with greater claims to global power than ever before. While still a long way behind the U.S. militarily, and both the U.S. and Japan economically, China’s dramatic dispatch of an astronaut into orbit the week before created a sense of awe among the other nations at the summit. With its space feat, China became only the third nation to put a human being into space. While many downplayed its importance, since Russia and the U.S. had done so 40 years ago, these observers did not usually note the fact that, like the U.S. and Russian space programs, China’s has important military purposes. Thus, the astronaut Yang Liwei returned to earth, but he left behind an orbital module capable of monitoring the U.S. military from space. As the Pentagon warned last summer, China is likely to develop “improved military space systems in the 2010-2020 time frame.” Back on earth, China’s economic growth rate, 8.5% for the first nine months of 2003, may really be closer to 11-12%, the FINANCIAL TIMES reported on Oct. 18-19. This is the highest rate of economic expansion in the world. While President Hu Jintao encouraged the Chinese masses to bask in the nationalistic glow of their conquest of space, he has also sought to dampen class tensions in other ways as well. These include speaking publicly about “the excessive widening of the income gap.” Here Hu was certainly not exaggerating, for there is widespread fear that China’s rapid growth carries with it deep social cleavages, which could be exacerbated by the coming economic slowdown that many predict. There is also the danger of a meltdown of the banking system, if China accedes to U.S. pressure to allow the value of its currency to climb. Over 100 million migrant workers, who are treated like foreigners in their own country, form the lowest-paid and most desperate part of the urban proletariat. Most of them young, with some actually locked up like slaves in their factories, these workers often toil for a pittance for subcontractors of the multinationals. A corrupt Communist Party and government bureaucracy connives in these practices, ignoring even the minimal existing labor laws. In rural areas, the source of these forced migrants, new peasant movements have sprung up. In an article on “Organized Peasant Struggles and Their Political Risks” that appeared this summer in the journal, ZHANLUE YU GUANLI (Strategy and Management), Yu Jianrong of the Academy of Social Sciences pointed to growing unrest, especially in Hunan Province. (No Chinese would need to be reminded that it was concerning Hunan that Mao Zedong wrote his famous 1927 “Report” extolling the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.) A new generation of peasant activists has emerged to oppose local mafias, which, in league with corrupt officials, are cheating peasants of their land. Some of these activists have characterized their situation as “a modern serfdom.” |
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