Saturday, August 23, 2008

China and Historical Development

Sometimes, if only in some ways, you can get to know a place better when you leave it and my reading of, "Out of Mao's Shadow"at least confirms an opinion that I voiced in an earlier blog when I said that China in its development will be confronted with those things that have confronted capitalist development elsewhere. Parallels with the Dickensian, Manchester, Capitalism of the nineteenth century are not wholly misplaced and if we are looking at workers history, there is a continuity between the Tolpuddle struggles of 1831/32 and the struggle of the workers in Liaoyang in China's north eastern industrial heartland in 2003.1There was to be no immediate success for the struggle at Tolpuddle and so it was too with the struggle in Liaoyang. However, if history does teach us a lesson it is that the struggle goes on. During my time in China it was not only my lack of language that meant that I remained in a sort of privileged ghetto unaware of what was really going on. My own embourgeoisement has meant that I am 'a priori' more concerned with the world created by Starbucks, Costa Coffee, the wireless internet and that means that reading a book is invariably required if I am to become aware of the bigger picture and with the bigger picture dawning on me fragments of the other China comes to mind; the people begging as we made our way back to our boat near the "Ghost Town" on the Yangzte, those people, once proud farmers and workers, who are forced to sell whatever they can to eek out a living and then the arrogance of those ex-pats of the crudest half education, the petite burgeioise sort who would find it difficult even to retain that status back home, who dismiss them as peasants and worse, much worse, the arrogance of their own compatriots towards them.
Fürstenfeldbruck is another world, of course, a world where nobody goes hungry and where the supermarkets are crammed full of lots and lots of nice things that people can generally afford. The good "machiato" is cheaper than it is in England and, yes, cheaper than it is China and, while England is not quite moving as fast as China one does get the feeling here in Upper Bavaria that nothing has really changed or is really changing but, maybe, that will be different when the Chinese buy their first village as a tourist attraction for those like the party officials and factory bosses who got rich quick at the expense of the workers. There might even be some entertainment for me to be had as a seventy something year old watching some rich Chinese and their German lawyers taking on the locals here.
1 Philip Pan "Out of Mao's Shadow; The Struggle for the Soul of a New China", pp113-146
The picture shows is of the table where I was sitting in the cafe in the well stocked supermarket in Fürstenfeldbruck, supping my coffee, reading my book and chewing the cud.

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