24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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The scent of success
There is no economic gloom in China. And for good reason, writes Ibrahim Nafie
At 7:00 am our flight touched down at Beijing's new international airport. Although it was another two hours before we reached our hotel, our hosts -- the Chinese newspaper The People -- had a full day's programme planned for us, beginning at 11:00am and lasting well into the evening.
Naturally, our interview with Chinese President Jiang Zemin was the high point of our trip to China. However, the tour also included meetings with political officials, journalists and intellectuals in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as visits to several locations showcasing China's economic and industrial progress.
I have visited China seven times over the past three decades, and every visit has presented me with a new China. Today, the Chinese capital glimmers like a modern European city. And Shanghai, which made a similar transition some time ago, has, by virtue of new urban development projects, gained an added lustre.
Oddly, the Chinese appear immune to the current global recession. Instead of the despondency that prevails elsewhere in the world, leaders and ordinary people alike are noticeably upbeat. A senior Foreign Ministry official explained why. Things couldn't be better for China, he told us. For the first time in decades the country is not in a state of war or near war. The 1940s brought the civil war between the communists and the Kuomintang in Taiwan, the 1950s the Korean War, the 1960s a flare-up with the Soviet Union, the 1970s the Vietnam War and the 1980s the Chinese-Vietnamese border conflict. Only with the onset of the 1990s did China experience an extensive period of peace, and with peace came rapid development.
Mao Tse-Tung had spoken frequently of "great leaps forward." However, it was not until after his death and after the downfall of the Gang of Four, who tried to engrave Mao's teachings in stone, that the Chinese were able to achieve those great leaps forward. As a result China is today a nation of staggering statistics, not only in terms of population and land area, but also in terms of economic indicators.
At a time of plummeting economic growth internationally Chinese officials expect 7.3 per cent growth this year. (Compare this to Egypt's, which will fall below 3 per cent this year.) Nor is there any reason to doubt our hosts' word. When a country's volume of foreign trade exceeds $500 billion and a single governorate -- Shanghai -- receives $100 billion in foreign investment in a decade and another governorate -- Chinpu, with a population of only 600,000 -- receives $4 billion in foreign investment, Chinese officials have the figures to back up their predictions.
In China we were struck by the resolve to lift China to the ranks of developed nations. Towards this end the Chinese are unanimous on the need to implement Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and to attract foreign investment.
China is now a member of the WTO, the advantages of which, the consensus holds, far outstrip its disadvantages. Of course, Chinese officials are acutely aware of the problems of assimilating into the global market. However, as the chairman of the Chinpu municipal council put it, Chinese products will never become truly competitive unless they face real competition in domestic markets.
Joining the WTO has made Chinese leaders more aware of the problems their economy faces. For example, it has drawn attention to under- investment in technological development. There is also, now, greater realisation of the need to develop the western provinces, not only because of Taliban attempts to meddle in the region, but because of the imperatives of comprehensive development. Chinese economic progress, our hosts told us, is contingent upon expanding domestic production and consumption, thereby enhancing the dynamism of the economy and rendering it more competitive. Developmental sights have thus turned westward, in the form of ambitious sister- city schemes in which wealthy cities "adopt" another city in a poorer part of the country in order to invest in its educational and infrastructural development.
Little wonder, then, that the Chinese are so optimistic and that, unlike the rest of the world, they thought 2001 was a good year. In addition to sustaining relatively high economic growth rates and WTO membership, they have other reasons to jubilate. China has been chosen to host the 2008 Olympics and its national football team, for the first time in history, has won a place in the World Cup finals.
Even with regard to strategic balances of power the Chinese are not as worried as we had previously imagined. Without exception, officials we met told us that China supported the US operation in Afghanistan; indeed that for China it brought an unmitigated strategic gain by eliminating a fundamentalist regime that had sought to disseminate its beliefs among the Muslim minority in western China and instigate separatist insurgence there. Moreover, no one we met was concerned with the question as to whether Osama Bin Laden and Al- Qa'eda were behind the 11 September suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In fact, on one occasion, when one of the Al- Ahram team posed this question, our interlocutor did not even bother to answer, as if the question were purely academic.
This does not mean that the Chinese are untroubled by the US military presence near their western border. When we asked our hosts whether they thought the US would fulfill its promise to leave Afghanistan once it accomplished its objectives there, their answer was invariably, "We'll have to wait and see." This enigmatic response is perhaps due to the fact that the Chinese are generally pleased with the way relations with the US have thawed (This was before the recent discovery of the bugging devices on the Boeing plane being fitted out in the US for President Zemin). Whereas Bush, in his electoral campaign, described China as an adversary, he now refers to China as an ally in the fight against terrorism. Tellingly, Beijing is preparing to welcome the US president with open arms next month.
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