In the US voters opted for "Change we can believe in". In China, according to Bloomberg, workers are taking a rather more direct route:
Labor strife is a ``top concern'' as the job outlook turns ``grim,'' Yin Weimin, head of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said today at a briefing....
It's a ``challenge to the regime's legitimacy when economic growth slows,'' said Joseph Cheng, a politics professor at City University of Hong Kong....
``People losing their jobs could well lead to more protests,'' said Kevin O'Brien, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley ....
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A survey of 84 cities showed demand for workers fell 5.5 percent in the third quarter, the first decline in years....
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Reports have already filtered out of protests in Guandong province, a manufacturing center neighboring Hong Kong. In one case last month, more than 1,000 people demonstrated to demand the government help obtain unpaid wages, Xinhua said.
We don't protest
Ever notice how reluctant Americans are to take to the streets and demand their rights? It really takes a lot of effort and seemingly with the TV age and now the Internet age it is even worse. If only we could get all of those bits flying through cyberspace to form images of real people with protest signs.
This is very worrying
I am in the midst of writing a paper that I hope to get published right now.
The gist of the paper is this. In East Asia, the legitimacy of governments is based either in their ability to provided material benefits: the economy. Or nationalism: the status of the nation internationally.
The Chinese have dropped $586 billion (about 1/5th of the country's $3.2 trillion nominal GDP) in order to create domestic stimulus. As it has stood, about half of Chinese GDP has resulted from international demand.
Without GDP growth in excess of 5% annually, the Chinese economy isn't going to be able to soak up the peasants who are being pushed off the land because of the poor opportunities in the countryside. That's going to release hellacious social forces, like labor riots in the cities that require the use of security forces to restore order.
Once a critical mass is reached, you have a revolutionary situation. The irony is that there is a change of regime in China it will not result from the growth of the urban middle class. A working class revolt? That's a real possibility.
Oh, the irony.
The CCP has a strategy in reserve though. Nationalism.
Chinese nationalism is intense, basically being of the same type that existed in Japan and Germany in the 1930s.
And they have an idea of "Greater China" that includes parts of Siberia, Mongolia, Taiwan, the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China sea, and at times parts of southeast Asia.
I'm going to be blunt.
If this stimulus package fails, the likely result is an intense Cold War with China.
In that case, the industrial base that we've funded the construction of with our trade is going to be used against us and others.
Free Market Liberalism always falls. The questions is whether social democracy can catch it before it falls into either communism or fascism.
We've been through this once before, but the arrogant fucking pricks on Wall Street have insisted that history teaches us nothing. We all are going to get to see just how wrong they are.
The tragedies
These have been some very interesting comments. And I have to say, the manfrommiddletown made a very good point on nationalism. If I recall correctly, something almost similar occurred in Japan in the late 30s. FDR placed an oil embargo on the Japanese, which caused their economy to go into a tailspin. Now they were already in a nationalistic furver, it was only just prior to it's annexation of parts of China (including the establishment of Manchukuo). We all know how that turned out.
Well in college in taking classes that focused on Asian history, there was a theme that came up when it came to politics and China. That was a certain number of disasters tend to preview the fate of a given political order. Now it's been a while since I was in class, but I believe it's known as either the Seven Disasters or something along those lines. That basically, throughout Chinese history, that seven or more/less great calamities hit the country that eventually leads to the current regime being toppled. Most of these calamities have been of the nature variety (earthquakes, drought) while in some rare occasions it has been political (failure of the boxer rebellion).
Either way, it seems to be a cycle that happens over and over again. Now the current regime is facing it's series of calamities. If we date back to the beginning of the Peoples Republic of China we have:
1) The famine from the Great Leap Forward
2) The Cultural Revolution
3) Tiennamen Square
4) the increasing desertification of China's agricultural areas
5) the recent earthquake and the deaths of 19,000 children
Keep in mind, that in the middle phase, nobody ever figures its' in the cycle. There is nothing in the rules that says an economic calamity won't be #6. Also for every "valley" they do experience peaks, yet I think the 7 disasters rules still applies. It's been going on since the formation of the Chin Dynasty.
last thing I'm worried about is China
and their overpopulation and India's is just not my concern either. They need to address it, China has, India...well, not exactly. It's true because they are way over populated, 1.3 billion China, about 1 billion India, they are way more vulnerable in down times due to the large raw numbers of people.
In terms of the U.S. becoming overpopulated that can happen also and seemingly policies are determined to make that happen at this growth rate through illegal and legal immigration.
True is China and India are slated to take over the United States so those horror stories of famine, economic calamity might be more applicable here and in terms of land that can produce agriculture, one might be especially leery of war against the United States to gain control of those lands...
although considering the U.S. is getting cremated economically I think China and India have already won the war through economic means.
The United States right now has people going hungry, millions of homeless. Literally the United States has Doctors without borders setting up Clinics periodically for free medical care and they cannot take care of all of the people who show up.
There is a mind set that somehow the United States will never be 3rd world or that these 3rd world countries still are 3rd world. They plain are not anymore. Their PPP is right below the United States, their GDP is expected to exceed the United States very soon.
As it is the United States has greater economic inequality than India and will probably exceed China and only Latin America will have more income inequality.
So, instead we might be looking for humanitarian aid from these countries for the United States.