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At present there is some talk that China does. Just as in the past in the thirties there was some talk that Russia (the Soviet Union) did. What did Russia do, and what is China doing to stake their claims on the future?

In totalitarian Russia (as in totalitarian China today) human labor was cheap, and could be sacrificed with impunity to the goals of the ruling class. From a distance the West watched Stalin and company transform the Russian people into a blunt instrument for moving the country rapidly into the future.

Most of all Stalin seemed to operate under the assumption that the Soviet Union had to do everything if not better at least bigger than the West, and hence the series of gigantic projects he undertook during the thirties, at least before his country was invaded by the Germans, that which again transformed the country, this time into one vast war machine.

Prime examples of Stalin’s huge projects that would take his country into the future were the city of Magnitogorsk and the White Sea Canal. In 1929, Stalin decreed that this city, that didn’t yet exist, be built from scratch around Magnitka – an entire mountain of pure iron ore in the southern Ural range, iron being of course the key ingredient of steel, and which, according to Stalin, the man of steel, would determine the future of the Soviet Union.  (My source for this and the following account of the White Sea Canal can be accessed here.)

With expertise provided by Communist sympathizers from the West Magnitogorsk, a
ready-made city for 450,000 inhabitants, was constructed in about five
years. The costs were kept down by having the heavy lifting done by
political prisoners, 30,000 of whom died in the effort. Steel
production began in 1934, but shortly after World War II the iron ore
ran out and the city’s economy collapsed.

And there was the White Sea Canal. Ever the optimist, this time Stalin
wanted connect the Baltic Sea, with its key port of Leningrad, to the
White Sea’s port of Archangelsk. The idea was that he could move the
Soviet navy back and forth. So Stalin had more political prisoners sent
to work on the canal – there was a seemingly endless supply from the
gulags – and after a few brutal years it was completed in 1933.

Disease, poor nutrition, and brutal conditions took a huge toll,
though, with as many as 250,000 of the slave laborers dead by the end
of it. Of course nothing of lasting benefit came of Stalin’s mad schemes, but at the time we marveled at what a nation could do if all its resources could be directed without opposition to its own ends, a new city, a new water way, and later the first man in space.

There were those of us who even wondered if we were on the wrong track. Didn’t President Roosevelt’s public works projects of the depression years pale in comparison?

The White Sea Canal was completely useless when finished. For most of its length
it was too shallow to admit anything larger than a small barge. Later a
book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and
engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be
recalled because in the meanwhile Stalin had ordered all the main
characters shot.

Now it’s China that threatens (promises?) to be the future, just as did the Soviet Union in the thirties. And because what we see coming from China is not the same as what we saw in the thirties from Russia we can’t readily dismiss what’s happening in China as being just more "mad schemes" no less wrong headed as those of Stalin.

Furthermore China is not so much doing things differently from the West, but in some respects both bigger and better. They have taken our production model (and much else besides) and with the benefit of cheap manual labor and borrowed Western ideas, have taken it much further than we ever did, or could.

To look at Chinese workers within a Chinese factory is to make one wonder if this is not the future for all of us. Why? Because it works. Production is way up and people all over the world are purchasing the products from the factory floors. And most important the workers on the factory floor are now sending a portion of their earnings to their families left behind in the villages.

China has taken the factory production model and made it the principal engine of their rapidly growing economy. Hundreds of thousands of people from the country have almost overnight transformed themselves into factory workers in the new cities on the coast.

You can go here to see my sources for the following text and images.

The largest mobile-phone manufacturer in China when this photo was shot, Bird Mobile has since been overtaken. Here, workers complete a manual-assembly portion of the phone-production process.

This is the main processing floor of the Deda chicken processing plant, a Thailand/China joint venture. The factory processes approximately 100 million chickens a year, which are mostly exported because of their superior quality.

 

Workers’ uniforms hang outside a dormitory located amid a massive
industrial complex. Waste from the complex has turned the river in the
foreground completely black.

Lunch time in the cafeteria of Youngor Textiles, the largest suit maker in China, lasts around 20 minutes.

From these pictures alone wouldn’t you have to say that China owns the future?  When people get together, live together, work and eat together, as some 200 million of them seem to be doing in present day China, who could ever stop them, let alone compete with them?

China, unlike the Soviet Union, is taking the best from the West, and trying to do it even better. The Soviet Union of course tried to do things differently from the West and achieved nothing but disastrous results. China is doing some things better than the West, or at least at a much lower cost. And in a market economy, in which China, again unlike the Soviet Union, is now immersed, lowering the costs is doing it better.

Also, China’s products have found hundreds of millions of buyers in the West and elsewhere, thus cementing their industry to the body of the world’s consumers, that which bodes well for their future (and for ours?). The Soviet Union’s products could not even find satisfied buyers within their own country, let alone the rest of the world.

Actually China produces not so much for its own people, who have little or no purchasing power of their own, but for us Americans, and to a lesser extent because of tariff barriers, the Europeans.

In China the production of goods of all kinds is not hindered by concerns for individual or employee rights. Their only concern is to make at the lowest possible cost exactly what their customers will most want to buy. And in fact hardly a day goes when the American consumer is not buying a product made in China.

Could this be a model for China’s future, our future, and the future of the world? In any case the free market will always seek out regions for the production of its goods where the costs of production are lowest, and, for the time being anyway, this region is China.

I end this discussion of China’s ownership of the future on a sour but important note, another opinion regarding in this case the not so bright future of the Asian giant.

I refer you to Guy Sorman’s article, The Empire of Lies, in the City Journal, Spring, 2007.  Sorman clearly implies that it’s not China who owns the future. China has enormous up until now un-addressed, let alone unresolved, problems stemming from its unchecked economic growth. Furthermore, I think if I asked Sorman who did own the future he would say it’s still America, and maybe just a little bit Europe and his own country, France, under its new anti-anti-American president Nicholas Sarkozy.

 

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This entry was posted on July 4, 2007 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Idle Thoughts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.