Economic Growth and Social Justice in China
Dongping Han
Warren Wilson College

           
There is no denying that China appears to be much wealthier than twenty-five years ago.   But apart from more superficial wealth, there are many other new things that are not so positive.  Twenty-five years ago, commercial advertising did not exist.  Today, Chinese TV, radio broadcast, and print media are filled with commercial advertising, much of which is false and illegal.  The Chinese Government is identifying illegal and false advertising in order to warn consumers, but they are not fast enough to keep up with all the false and illegal advertising being produced.  Twenty-five years, there were no counterfeit and falsely labeled and promoted products in China.  People did not need to worry about the safety and quality of the products they bought.  Today, there are many such products.  People can never be sure if the products they buy are real or safe enough to use.  There are poisonous food products, including poisonous milk powder, wine, liquor, flour, and rice on the market, and Chinese media have reported that people have died from these poisonous products.  Twenty-five years ago, China had no prostitutes, no drugs, very little crime, and very little corruption.  Today, prostitutes are everywhere in Chinese life.   Drug abuse is becoming an epidemic, which in turn has given rise to China’s so-called “AIDS epidemic.”  

Twenty-five years ago, China was one of the most equal societies on earth, with a Gini index below 0.3.  But today, China is one of the most unequal societies on earth, with a Gini index that has reached 0.6 (according to a secret survey by China’s Academy of Social Sciences in the fall of 2004).  Because the gap between the rich and poor has increased to such a high level, the tension between the rich and poor, between the government and the people, has reached an unprecedented level.  Consequently, there have been outbreaks of popular protests against the government on a daily basis.  According to some statistics, there are over three hundred protests and demonstrations, often violently involving over one hundred people, every day.  In the fall of 2004, there were two huge incidents involving over 100,000 people storming local governments.   International media claim that China has entered a period with high occurrences of sudden and public incidents (Han Yinghong, “Tufa gonggong shijian, zhongguo jinru gaofaqi”—China has entered a period of high occurrences of sudden and public incidents) Lianhe Zaobao, August 8, 2005).

            Therefore, the question regarding China now is not whether it has grown too fast,   but rather, how can the benefits of economic growth be spread more evenly so that the people who have been deprived of the benefits so far could have some stake in the current economic development, enough to allow it to continue?           
The problems the Chinese Government faces are clear and simple, and solutions for such problems are straightforward and equally simple.  The government needs to redistribute the country’s wealth more evenly through taxing schemes, through anti-corruption schemes, and many more other social reforms which will not be hard to design.   But the implementation of such program will not be easy.  The elite in China, the government officials, the capitalists and intellectual community, are well positioned to defend their vested interests.  It would be foolish to expect the Chinese elite to compromise their positions and their interests for the benefit of the working class; this has been a classic shortsightedness of the Chinese elite, who have been confined by their class limitations throughout Chinese history.

 There are international ramifications as well.   The Chinese elite, both the intellectual community and capitalist circles, are well connected with international forces.  They will brand any efforts toward softening the conditions for the working class as backward reform, or a return to Maoist socialism, in order to mobilize public opinion and international capitalist forces who have some stake in perpetuating the status quo of China’s development path.  Therefore, the current leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, even if it sees the problem and knows the solutions, will be unlikely to take the risk of offending the Chinese elite and the international forces behind it by launching any program that will solve the deep-rooted social problems China faces today.   It is more likely that the different social forces and contradictions will continue to evolve and take their natural course—a course that eventually will lead to some kind of social upheaval or revolutionary measures to solve these contradictions, once and for all.