Environmental Sustainability and Chinas Recent Economic Development - Essay Example

185585 INTRODUCTION China's recent economic development has been beyond all expectations. In 1997, the country recorded 8.8% of economic growth, which is considered to be sustainable and beyond inflation. Chinese' story had been akin to winning all the way, though the cracks show surreptitiously. This kind of economic growth via globalisation does not agree with the country's ideologies and the communist way of life and administration. When globalisation happened, China simply decided that it did not need the isolation and the rogue country status any more. It has also been alarmed by the fall of Soviet Union. China naturally wants to get benefits of globalisation and has been showing a reformed smiling face to the global economic world. For a communist regime, this is no mean task and even though the internal control has never been slackened in any way. The economic conditions are definitely exhilarating, but western economists say that there are obvious pitfalls in the economic path chosen by Chinese government unless it makes amends for economic and environmental sustainability. ARGUMENT: China is the most populous country in the world having population density of more than 130 people per sq. km. The family plan came into being when the Chinese government realised that the population problem is getting out of hand. "Chinese government realized that the over-rapid population growth was harmful to economic and social development, and would cause great difficulties in the fields of employment, housing, communications and medical care; and that if China could not effectively check the over-rapid population growth, and alleviate the tremendous pressure that the population growth was exerting on land, forests and water resources, the worsening of the ecology and the environment in the coming decades would be disastrous, thus endangering the necessary conditions for the survival of humanity, and sustainable social and economic development" http://www.china.org.cn/e-china/population/population.htm China's economic development is not simply based on the globalisation and it's far reaching effects. It is also based on factors like capital investment and productivity growth which is undeniable from any standards. "Economists generally attribute much of China's rapid economic growth to two main factors: large-scale capital investment (financed by large domestic savings and foreign investment) and rapid productivity growth. These two factors appear to have gone together hand in hand. Economic reforms led to higher efficiency in the economy, which boosted output and increased resources for additional investment in the economy" according to CRI issue brief for Congress", http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB98014.pdf It is considered to be Chinese miracle that the economic growth of China has altered the world economic scene. But according to economic analysers, Chinese economic growth has reached a critical stage, where more caution is necessary in policy making. "At the same time, China's economic transition also reached a critical stage. Significant internal developments were and still are forcing the government to consider more aggressive reforms" http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_n3_v33/ai_20946408 But, there are many internal and external factors hindering Chinese economic growth. It is not easy to change the economic internal scenario overnight from an autocratically managed, centralised economy into a liberalised with slackened control one overnight. There are many steps to be taken mainly to alter the internal shape of the economy, industry, finance and business and naturally, the path to do that is rather rough. It is true that China is facing difficulties with state owned enterprises, which are running under loss and are about to shut down. The government has decided to support the larger enterprises, and the smaller enterprises will become part of history. China's economic development has caused other Asian and Western countries to sit up and take notice. China, till now, has shown no chinks in its armour and its external face of political leadership is as strong as ever. COUNTER ARGUMENT There are two absolutely diverse views about Chinese economy, one is idealistically and rather unrealistically optimistic and another, terribly pessimistic. For the people who are sceptical in placing trust on the communism that is showing the signs of liberalisation, China is going in the same direction as Soviet Union, whereas the optimistic school reiterates its faith in Chinese economy by saying that both the liberalisation and the economic growth are here to stay. "Views of the Chinese economy thus fluctuate between these two poles. This report aims mainly to shed light on the overall picture of Chinese economic power, using croeconomic statistics released by the Chinese government" Development Bank of Japan, Research Report, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN016640.pdf There is no doubt that China has tried hard to build and repair its new and available infrastructures rapidly. Today's China can boast of good roads, buildings, necessities even in the rural area. Definitely it is a painful growth, because contrary to the world opinion when China was a closed country, Chinese government hardly took any great trouble to revolutionise the rural sector. This is happening now, and it is the doing of globalisation. Some of the sectors that saw very modern changes are the transport system and agricultural land use. Urban areas always enjoyed governmental attention in China. Now in recent years, rural regions too are getting their fair share that would have happened decades ago. "Conventional approaches to understanding the transportation and land use system focus on the interaction between varying (usually complementary) socio-economic fields. The underlying forces nearly always analyzed within or between urban areas are most often characterized in terms of distance, journey time or cost," Marton (2000, p.132). It is also argued that rapid growth has imbalanced Chinese economic and political future. With the stunning development, issues like pollution, sustainability and eco-environment have been disregarded and are thrown to the winds to make place for the economic growth. This could be too ambitious a plan for the country of China's size. China wisely has invested in domestic and regional economic plans. Then again political and social plans do not co-inside with the economic plans. . POLITICAL INSTABILITY Politically Chinese government seems to be gearing up for the eventual turning point not only in the economy, but also in the political field. Many barriers are already down, but it looks slower than expected initially and the turning point is rather blurred. "The 'turning point' will not be as sharp in China as in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. Greater size and geographic and economic diversity and more daunting internal barriers to the movement of people, goods, services and capital mean that labour scarcity will spread more slowly from the main centres of economic dynamism in China," Garnaut and Song (2006, p.4). China, being a communist autocratically ruled country, has its own problems of adjustment politically, economically and ideologically. Still, talking about only the economy, there is a lot of difference between the previous, acutely guarded Chinese economy and today's more liberal, economy, at least from an external point of view. There is a tremendous growth of buyers' market that is totally unprecedented. There are definite systems that the planned economy could be a thing of the past. "Since 1978, along with the dismantling of the planned economy system and the deepening of the reform of the economic system, commodity, capital, labor service and technology markets have appeared one after the other in China. Now China has transformed its planned economy system into an initial socialist market economy system. As a result the regulatory function of the market has been strengthened tremendously" http://www.china.org.cn/e-china/marketeconomy/introduction.htm Talking about the political changes, some writers feel that changing the political set-up of more than half a century might not be difficult for China. "Another prominent aspect of financial sector reform has been that governmental control over financial institutions has been relaxed. Prior to the transition to a market economy, financial institutions were directly controlled by the central government, interest rates were fixed at low levels, and the volume and direction of credits was decreed in a detailed manner by the credit plan," Laurenceson (2003, p.124). They feel that the system has outlived its tenure and now the Chinese administration cannot return to Mao principles of Red China. With the world busily moving forward and autocratic regimes fast becoming a thing of the past, China, even though it is not prepared to liberalise fully, cannot return to the old Communism any more. They are terribly wary of too much liberalisation and have warned Hong Kong against it. Still returning to the 1949 Revolution point looks almost impossible. China, however ruthlessly it has handled the earlier demands of democracy, cannot be unaware of the simmering need for democracy in its citizens. Incidents like Tiananmen Square made President Clinton to warn China the dangers of political instability if the administration refuses to reform itself. There are definitely undercurrents of political turmoil, even though it is difficult to read it due to the closed nature of Chinese media. This is apart from the economic instability despite enormous growth, unemployment, workers being laid off, banking crisis, government crackdowns, hyperinflation and general discontentment. Communist party with its narrow base support does not have highly charismatic leaders and have to depend on its power to run the country. Some political thinkers are of the opinion that control over rural areas is waning. Killer squads, disappearance of any kind of opposition, even an assumed one, fear psychosis, weak organisations without grass root support, are unable to control the masses who have started expressing their discontent openly since 1998. Despite of impressive economic and industrial growth, China is yet to develop conflict solving institutions. Communist Party does not face any threat at all, as all the threats get eliminated from time to time, and still remains a formidable and fearsome force that can effectively control the massive country. But if one looks carefully, it is easy to find the cracks. CONCLUSION The phenomenal growth in the economy has left most of the economic and social thinkers baffled while the political thinkers are measuring the long-term effects on the Chinese political scene which definitely cannot be ruled out. Economic development has ushered in an era of inequality of wealth and there exists enormous rural-urban disparity today in China. Studying China is not an easy task. Despite the external propaganda that China is being systematically democratised, the real fact still remains that a lot has not been done in this area other than the mere facade of liberalisation. This does not mean that nothing has been done. It only means that China essentially still remains Communist and hard-fisted. Reforms were initiated in the end of 1980s because The Red China was going in the direction of Soviet Union. It was noticed by the Communist Party of China that change and deviation from the set course was absolutely necessary and hence, the economic environment of China changed under Deng Xiaoping. "Around a core of State Industries, a more liberalised and decentralised system of collective and private enterprises developed with impressive speed. Income and living standards rapidly increased. Foreign trade and investments integrated China into the global economy," Chang (1998, p.131). Under the circumstances, China has to go through ideological and institutional changes as rapidly as it can to prevent itself from going the Soviet Union way. Once the central authority crumbles, it is only a matter of time for the terribly diverse regions to disintegrate. Failure to reform will make the economic development stagnate and this will result on definite pressure on the party. This will also lead to corruption and inefficient regime. If the reforms are not placed immediately, there is a danger of split in the ruling coalition and it will be followed by an ideological split. As stated by Pei (1994) "Indeed, although China is unlikely to become another Indonesia today, it is very likely to become one in ten years' time if its leaders are lulled into complacency." Apart from the above, China has to give attention to the environmental sustainability in tourism and industrial activities. It is necessary to curb the polluting pattern, so that it could contribute to the world preservation movement. With its rapid growth, China remains perhaps the biggest polluter of environment in the world and does not care about it. It should go for sustainability in tourism too and should prevent all measures of pollution. With the Chinese way of life, where most of the animals are targeting for eating, it is no wonder that almost all the species have become almost extinct and it is necessary for the administration to address this matter. Political stability through reforms, economic growth through sustainable and non-polluting means, social stability by introducing radical democratic institutions and making sustainability the core course of tourism and ways of living are the need of the hour for China today. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Chang, Maria Hsia (1998), The Labors of Sisyphus; The Economic Development of Communist China, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers. 2. Garnaut, Ross and Song, Ligang (2006), The Turning Point in China's Economic Development, Canberra, Asia Pacific Press. 3. Laurenceson, James (2003), Financial Reform and Economic Development in China, Cheltenham, Northampton. 4. Marton, Andrew M. (2000), China's Spatial Economic Development: Regional Transformation, Routledge, London. 5. Pei, Minxin (1998), Is China Unstable http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_13/china_pei.html 6. Wang, Yanlai (2003), China's Economic Development and Democratization, Aldershot, Hants. ONLINE SOURCES: 1. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_n3_v33/ai_20946408 2. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB98014.pdf 3. http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN016640.pdf 4. http://www.china.org.cn/e-china/population/population.htm 5. http://www.china.org.cn/e-china/marketeconomy/introduction.htm Read More