“A Complete Failure of Governance”
- 02.01.2008 - 6:50 PMSince snow started falling in the second week of last month, southwestern, central, eastern, and southern China have been gripped by a massive storm. About 105 million people have been affected in 17 provinces. Some 2.5 million of them have been or will be evacuated. Around 30 million have lost electricity. A quarter of a million troops have been mobilized to shovel snow and provide emergency relief. Approximately 16 million livestock have been killed. The storm will continue through at least the second week of this month, according to the China Meteorological Administration.
The snow could not have come at a worse time. Tens of millions of workers are on the move, making their once-yearly trip home for Chinese New Year, which begins next week. Hundreds of thousands of desperate, weary, and angry travelers, most of whom depend on the rails, are now stranded. On Wednesday, Premier Wen Jiabao went to the Guangzhou train station to calm distraught passengers through a megaphone. About 217,000 travelers were stuck in that city, the capital of southern Guangdong province. Security around the nation has been tightened where crowds have gathered. The ruling Politburo met on Tuesday in emergency session.
The storm is, according to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, “historically unprecedented.” The official People’s Daily calls it “the worst in 50 years.” Beijing can’t be blamed for the weather, but central government policies have severely aggravated the suffering. “What has appeared to be a natural disaster is, in essence, a massive failure of governance,” said Mao Shoulong of Renmin University. Attempts at central planning have turned an unusual weather pattern into a national disaster.
There are about a dozen wrongheaded policies that have aggravated the situation, but the most misguided of them are the central government’s price controls on energy, needed to power the trains to take people home. Beijing technocrats have been waging an unsuccessful campaign to slow accelerating inflation. As an integral part of that effort, the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, has put a ceiling on electricity charges. The NDRC in the last few days has been insisting that its cap has not led to the decline in the generation of power that is aggravating the ongoing crisis, but its case is unconvincing. The trains won’t move unless there is electricity, and there is an electricity shortage due in large measure to overregulation of the economy. There is also a national shortage of coal, used to generate most of the country’s electricity, due to a result of a mix of central government measures.
China needs better weather, but more important it needs a more open economy. The forecasters say the snow will stop sometime this month. Unfortunately, that will be long before the country gets better economic planning.
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February 1st, 2008 at 8:07 PM
My wife is over there right now. In Beijing no sense of crisis, rather it seems it is buy buy buy. I have some questions about the structure if any of the Chinese state and economy, but for the well to do things have not been better since 1949.
But as we agreed, on analysis, in every process of enrichment, be it the development of a genuinely private company or the appropriation of state property, the corrupt party bureaucrat is indispensable at some point in the deal. Clausewitz said violence in war was like specie in economic transactions–maybe only glimpsed at one moment, but the heart of the matter. Corruption and communism have the same role in China
A an educational TV show was about the eunuch He Shen upon whom the corruption of the Qianlong reign was blamed. When Jiaqing came in, the first thing he did was kill He Shen. The lecturer noted that the killing of He Shen was the best thing Jiaqing did, because he did not do what he should have done: namely, create institutions and objective mechanisms that will prevent corruption altogether. The other topic of TV documentaries and soap operas is imperial succession. Don’t tell me the Chinese don’t know what their problems are. Or that they cannot talk about them. It is what in Russia was called “Aesopian language.”
And if you love Sushi, as I do, remember that the mercury we now fear in it is produced, to some extent, by the burning of coal in China and unscrubbed discharge of smoke.
Let’s watch the snow though. It is everything Gordon says, and people know it. And more is said to be on the way.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:08 PM
Perhaps we can arrange a cultural exchange. Send them (”You’re doing a heckuva job!”) Brownie.
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:58 AM
I blame Global Warming, myself.
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:09 AM
If China had a free press, these issues could be explored, debated, and corrected. The snow problem is parallel to the problem of pollution, which has existed for decades and is only being faced now that the Olympics are approaching.
Democracy costs nothing and wins everything.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:29 PM
Sorry to be off-topic, but it’s Act 2-3 intermission of the Met broadcast of Die Walküre and I just heard a clueless (or dissembling) Loren Maazel rationalize the forthcoming “outreach” trip to North Korea. Music is the way, commented the host approvingly. Sieg Heil!
February 2nd, 2008 at 5:11 PM
I don’t think you’re off-topic at all, Seth, since we are talking about dictatorships, which not only repress people but are subject to natural and unnatural (pollution-related) catastrophes to a degree unknown in democratic societies. Still, as I have written before, dictators ordinarily suppress music, as Mao and Khomeini did, and as Plato (who never got a chance to be a dictator) advocated. When I lived in China during Beijing Spring, the students at Hebei University took over the campus loudspeaders (May 18, 1989) and played Beethoven all day.
Kim Jung Il is both a monster and an incompetent. He doesn’t know to what extent music will stimulate thought. Playing Beethoven, to be sure, did not save China from dictatorship, but it was part of the complicated process that moved it from totalitarianism to authoritarianism.
February 2nd, 2008 at 5:37 PM
George, I don’t think dictators suppress music, just music they don’t like. Stalin tolerated plenty of great music and I’ve already alluded with exquisite subtlety to his chief rival. Will the Met play deliberately subversive melodies or will it just perform beautiful music in the belief that anything that makes us sigh also makes us think? Bet on the latter.
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:01 PM
George, the Beethoven-in-Hebei anecdote shows how the human spirit can survive almost anything. That is fascinating. Thank you.
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:31 PM
Make that the New York Philharmonic visit, under Maazel. They’re saving Beethoven’s Fifth for Seoul.
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:16 PM
Is Al Gore in China?