The brown peril - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Chip Rolley
THE WAY CHINA GOES ABOUT MEETING ITS HYDRO TARGETS is cause for concern for some. One of the most tragic of China's "mass incidents" was in Hanyuan County on the Dadu River flood plains just east of the Tibetan Plateau in western Sichuan province. In early November 2004, between 20,000 and 100,000 villagers clashed with police, paramilitary and military units at the Pubugou Hydro-electric Dam project there. A media blackout on the riot makes reliable casualty figures impossible to obtain, allowing wild speculation, with figures as low as seventeen and as high as 10,000 (the latter reported by the news website The Epoch Times, which is allegedly funded by Falun Gong). The riots were prompted by outrage that compensation for displacement was too low. Villagers reportedly complained that government officials embezzled the compensation money, leaving villagers with less than half of what they were originally promised. Others said the original compensation plan was not even enough to compensate for the destruction of their livelihood.
"Hanyuan" literally means "the source of the Han", the Han being China's (and, for that matter, the world's) majority ethnic group. Its potential to rise to the level of symbol in a critique of China's style of economic development is seized upon by He Qinglian, an economist and now dissident writer, in an essay in Hong Kong's Kaifang (Open) magazine.
The Chinese government is "draining the pond to get all the fish", she says – a proverb that roughly equates to "killing the goose that lays the golden egg". The Pubugou Dam project in Hanyuan is one of hundreds of dam projects throughout China that range in size and capacity from small to the world's largest, the Three Gorges Dam. These projects are not only destroying rivers and local ecosystems, as both local and international environmental activists have protested; He Qinglian argues they are also turning economically self-sufficient farmers into impoverished migrant labourers. Money paid for land seized, even when it does reflect the real-estate market value (and is not embezzled), does nothing to compensate for the destruction of a livelihood. This is, she says, the necessary outcome of China's high-speed, high-energy-consuming economic development.
Educated in the economics department at Shanghai's Fudan University, one of China's most prestigious, He Qinglian established her reputation in 1998 with a spirited and controversial critique of the foundations of China's economic development since the advent of Deng Xiaoping. Xiandaihua de xianjing (The Pitfalls of Modernisation) was published on the mainland thanks to the support of Liu Ji, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an adviser to Jiang Zemin. While the book was considerably toned down from a stronger critique earlier published in Hong Kong, its message was nevertheless clear: economic reform without political reform is doomed to fail. That it was published at all on the mainland was sign of a loosening of authoritarian controls. (Those controls later tightened again and a subsequent article by He Qinglian in a mainland journal found her demoted, placed under surveillance and banned in the media. However, she continues her critique in overseas Chinese publications, such as Kaifang.)
How much of China's economic miracle is based on the impoverishment of its people? For He Qinglian, the number of poor created by this form of economic development is just as extraordinary as the wealth produced. She asks us to consider the result when we multiply the number of people who have been displaced and impoverished by large-scale hydro schemes by the number of such schemes planned.
MY STUDENTS AT TSINGHUA USED TO GO ON AND ON ABOUT Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (Simon & Schuster, 1998). But a new thesis is developing. Or is it a sub-thesis? The Brown Peril is Huntington with teeth. Because of its size, China's energy demand represents a threat not only to its own environment and world climate, but also to the West's continuing demand for energy. The brown peril overwhelming China assumes a larger mythical power that, like the "yellow peril" before it, promises the world inevitable conflict. China is a hungry behemoth roaming the world in pursuit of its prey – mineral and energy resources. Such fears are suppressed to varying degrees in Australia – by players across the political spectrum. We appear to be suspending any concerns we may have about the future geopolitical line-up for the present economic gains.
The Guardian reports that change in China now "gobbles up" global resources and represents "enormous risk" for the world balance of power. Change is happening on a "frightening scale", it warns. US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick avows there is "a cauldron of anxiety about China". "Analysts" on Fox TV in the US tell us the war in Iraq was indeed to secure oil supplies there – justified by the need to stop China getting them. (With that in mind, The Australian's headline in January 2006 warning "China's oil thirst may plunge world into war" seems a little late.)
Unlike the US, so far China's global adventurism has been relatively peaceful, accomplished by the chequebook rather than the gun. With a trade surplus of $US10.4 billion and foreign exchange reserves of $US745 billion, China can afford to be peaceful.
Its pursuit of oil has led it to strike deals with the axis-of-evil state of Iran and the wannabe Sudan. (All other supply routes are tied up by the US, Japan and Europe.) Sudan owes its oil industry to China, such has been the impact of its investment there. Chinese workers built one pipeline there and China National Petroleum Corporation built and fully operates (again with Chinese workers) Khartoum's major oil refinery. In Brazil, Chinese investment deals include the construction of an oil pipeline for Sinopec, one of China's major state-owned energy companies, a steel mill for the Shanghai-based Baosteel and major infrastructure for the transport of soya, which could contribute to China's need for biofuel. In 2004, China overtook the US as Chile's largest copper buyer. Venezuela has signed a bilateral trade deal with China largely focused on energy exports. Roads, dams and major ports from Angola to Kazakhstan are being built either with Chinese direct investment or low-interest loans tied to deals for Chinese firms.
For some of these countries (such as Brazil and Venezuela), these deals not only offer financial and infrastructure rewards, they are a way to make a play against American hegemony – the developing world's turn to play the China card.
FOR AUSTRALIA, THE MORE PRESSING ASPECT OF THE BROWN PERIL is whether, and how, Australia abandons Labor's three mines uranium policy and develops supply routes to China with yellowcake. A key component in China's "clean" energy bid will be an increase in energy sourced to nuclear power.
In the short to medium term, it's difficult to see how Australia will not continue to reap the rewards of its now twenty-year courtship of China. Nevertheless, China is exercising its consumer muscle, seeking to set prices, much in the way Japan did in the eighties. Fu Ying, China's ambassador to Australia, talked tough at the Melbourne Mining Club late last year, saying the high coal and iron-ore prices (the latter rose 71.5 per cent in 2004) and a source country's "political environment" will force China to "be careful in where it chooses its source of supply". Is this a savvy consumer simply trying to get the best price? Or does this foreshadow stronger attempts to control supply? Will BHP soon be adding another suffix to its name?
It's difficult to gauge what may come of the pressure rising resource prices place on an industrialising China; difficult to untangle what of the brown peril is real – what is a genuine politico-security concern from what is convenient scaremongering based on irrational (can we anymore say race– or culture-based?) fear. Is the brown peril a myth? Is it merely the hysterical flipside of the enthusiasm of the China growth junkies who populate the financial pages? Geo-strategic nervosa is a peculiarly American disease. How much of the brown peril has to do with the fact that, ten years after extricating itself from its extraordinary debt to Japan, the US is now again in debt to an East Asian country. Fear of China's growth sits uncomfortably with any sense of natural justice. The world is on its climate-change precipice not because of anything China did, but because of what has been done by the West, particularly the United States, where per capita energy consumption is seven times that in China.
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n October 1999, China launched a week-long celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic. I had been there for a month. September in the city had been oppressive, the lingering summer trapping in the pollution of the factories that surround the capital. And then October 1, National Day, arrived. Autumn is typically the most temperate season in Beijing, but in 1999, literally with the turn of the clock to October 1, the air that had been thick and stifling was crystal clear, the sky that had been harshly grey was bright blue. Something was amiss. Overnight China's development had come to a halt. Just for the week. ♦