Brain Fertilizer

If you peruse what I've written about China, or if you can find the archives of my older blogs online, you'll see that several times I've insisted that calling the Mainland Chinese "Communist" is inaccurate. They haven't really been communist for more than a decade.

However, they are still Totalitarian. You don't need to be communist to be a despotic government.

Market reforms have come to much of China, and the urban elite are getting rich, achieving materialistic dreams.

But the rural peasants are being left behind. And they are getting resentful.

Communism gained favor in China because communist leaders promised the people they would own their land and everyone could get rich. They toppled the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) that supported wealthy landowners oppressing tenant farmers to institute land reform and let the people own the land! ...and then treated the brand new peasant landowners like tenants, taxing them heavily and telling them how much they could sell their agricultural products for. But the People put up with it, because after all, they now owned the land, and the heavy taxes and price controls were just a temporary sacrifice to help everyone get rich!

We've seen how well that worked out.

On a trip to Beijing two years ago, I met some of my wife's cousins from the countryside. They were engaged in making counterfeit bags, from what I gather. They were getting married, and it was pretty much an arranged marriage, having been decided since the kids were young that the marriage would be an excellent business alliance: one family made the bag parts, the other assembled them into the nearly-finished product. It was up to the kids to reject the marriage if they wanted to, but it seemed to me they were pretty excited about going through with it. They had come to Beijing to see the city and buy music and clothes and such.

We had a great talk, and they invited us to come to their home on our next trip to China. I really liked them, and in trying to be polite and warm, I invited them to come visit us in the United States someday, even if it took them 10 years or so. They looked uncomfortable and said, "That would be beyond our reach, even if we saved for our whole lives." We talked about financial realities and the difference between urban and rural economies a few minutes, and I pointed out that it was impossible to predict what the situation might be in 5 or 10 years, that if wealth ever reached the countryside, they might find the whole situation changing to their advantage. They looked skeptical and shook their head.

I still feel bad about that.

Because nearly 5 years later, despite Beijing's economy growing to the point that nearly everyone has cars now and prices for apartments/homes in the city now rival that of Seattle, the world changes if you go 50 miles out of the city. Maybe China needs a Wal-Mart that will be cheap goods to the countryside?

The point is, the government still controls the prices on many things. China is in a difficult situation, with 1/5th the world's population, but only 1/10th of the world's arable land. Food is always an issue in China. They still great each other with "Have you eaten?" and some of the most important and elaborate points of etiquette revolve around offering and refusing food between guest and host.

With a true market system of supply and demand, the peasants could get rich. They could bleed off some of the wealth from urban areas and make it worthwhile for someone to stay in the country. Perhaps the internet might help the rural poor sidestep market controls to sell their product more directly? Perhaps what little wealth they have as a group could use the internet to attract products to create a market in reaching out to the rural poor?

I'm serious about rural China needing a Wal-Mart. Is the US the economic juggernaut it is today because we had the Sears, Roebuck and Co. mail-order catalog? Because Wal-Mart was its successor in spirit? You can only have true wealth if your most isolated can use a collective buying power to obtain cheap and reliable goods.

By bringing wealth* to the rural areas, is Wal-Mart the capitalist version of the most basic communist goal?

*not wealth in pure dollar amount, but in terms of having purchasing power to buy comfort and an array of luxury items