"The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries - part of the "let some get rich first" policy announced by Deng and affirmed by his successors - has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world's poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs.
More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world's highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials.
Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the "right-wing radicals" or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) and who argue for China's integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.
Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. China's intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: "Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism."
Which is not to say the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese - of what Wang dubbed "consumer nationalism."
Wang added: "Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India."
In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from Shenzhen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses.
In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.
Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. "People claim," he said, "that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/world/asia/13iht-left.3148238.html?_r=1
In the ideas of Hayek and Friedman we seem to meet something that is more than just theory, but a pure force already existent in the world willed into (reality detatched) writing. In their writings we find the intellectual framework for dismantling the hard won gains and support/societal structure of a multitude of varied cultures, and the blank slate generation of upended cultures who find everything they once grasped disappearing in a haze of numbers and business contacts. Those without an interest in the intellectual movements of professors in Anglo-Saxon countries are suddenly being told that they way their lives were organized was a mere illusion and this is the way the world truly works, no matter its unsustainability, your living standards, and your own cultural beliefs. To these people who were not brought up in the framework of western capital movements, neoliberalism came down from their own leadership like a natural disaster, with no rationale in their own traditions to explain it to them. Why does the state owned factory need to be sold off, why the decrease in wages, the reduction in living standards, etc? In western market terms these are explained as becoming competitive, profit generating, etc etc, but to the workers of the factory there is no reason, it is just foolishness. And in the end it was the common sense view of the outside that was right, it was foolishness, but how to explain common sense to the culture of power that no longer saw the world from the point of view of the universal? Neoliberal belief seems to go hand in hand with power, those with power who dont care just getting the jist of it and those who do espousing it. The everybody else is forced trying to fight for minor concessions, for gains we already once had, writing footnotes in the margins of Hayek and Friedman.
What makes this all the more frustrating is this has been what the left has been doing for the last twenty years, and we seem to have gotten nowhere, as we see in this article by a leading Chinese leftist. He is focused on finding a China model of development, but in the end he is just writing in Chinese critiques of Hayek that have existed in the west for the last 40 years. I wish him the best of luck, and I admire that he thinks the communist party can still be a force for change (which I think it can be too, if only because of the symbolic aspect of its origin), but to me it just seems that the intellectual movement has stalled and we are stuck watching the markets repeat the same damn mistakes. Maybe this is what is termed as accelerationism (leftists who believe we should just let captitalism run wild, release it completely, to speed up its ineivitable collapse) but a belief in a socalled accelerationism is a pretty pathetic concession.
In a world where the power of state is dismantled except to protect the anarchy of market forces, what happens to the segments of the population who are not capable of playing the 10% of the world's game?
"The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: "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."
This is the new capitalism, the authoritarian based model of Singapore and China which are used to rein in the market's excesses. You can see it even in America, where frustration with congress is at an all time high and there is a strong anger that nobody can take on wall street. If a moderate capitalism once led to an open society, a radical capitalism is leading to a dysfunctional anarchy/failed state or an authoritarian one, a government formed by the market through the money people are willing to invest in it to shape policy. While the situation in Thailand is complicated, I think it is pretty clear that democracy and neoliberalism have failed Thailand. Before you can argue that it merely didnt significantly help 90% of Thailand's population, but with the Red's reterritorialization of the Ratchaprasong area, we have a vision of Thailand as a country straddling the border of failed/authoritarian state.
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