INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (IV)

Continued from:
INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (I)
(http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/02/information-anarchy-is-good-democratic.html) 
INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (II)

(http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/02/information-anarchy-is-good-democratic_09.html)
INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (III)

http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/02/information-anarchy-is-good-democratic_12.html 

Increasing number of strikes – increasing realization of the widening income gap – increasing flow of information – midst the year of the decadal transition in China’s political leadership! 

The backdrop of the foreground called the ‘economic miracle of China’ looks debilitating.

THE DECADAL POLITICAL TRANSITION AND THE ELITIST HUE

Later this year, China is going to see the major organizational change with face changes in the 300-member Central Committee, 25-member Politburo and 9-member Politburo Standing Committee. The prevailing economic and political circumstances are unlike the last time when Hu Jintao took the rein.

Growth was good. It was minus the talks of the growth rate stagnation. Cheap labour didn’t see it as coming cheap to the factory factor. Beijing Olympics 2008 had not happened. The world and the Chinese people had not seen the blind rush to look developed even if it meant forcibly throwing the lower strata of the society and the migrant population out of the monstrous Megapolis cities of the ‘new-age China’.

And moreover, there was no social media threat. What seemed unlikely in China of 2002 looks increasingly likely in China of 2012?

Growth rate is coming down and its stagnation is well realized now. All this while, China has been urbanizing rapidly creating marvels of the structural engineering leaving at bay the human engineering exercise. Now as orders are decreasing and pangs of another global economic crisis after the 2008 bloodbath on the bourses looming larger, this urbanization is looking more like a bane.

What would millions of the migrant workers do if the employment generation stagnates?

Prices are rising disproportionate to the income level rise of the millions of workers of the factory China, be it the migrants or the middle class. Pressure on survival and that scarce independent social security in China is rising. Millions of the dreams are dying; the dreams that, somehow, had dreamt of Maslow’s realization.

Slowing economic growth also means China would need to bring down its public spending on those big-ticket infrastructure projects. The country is already under pressure after reckless spending in the name of the economic stimulus. Cities need to send migrant workers back to their villages to ward-off the increasing pressure of public expenditure in the cities.

Most of these migrant workers are second generation semi-skilled hands with no exposure to agriculture. And like any other developing country, rural China, too, doesn’t have anything but agriculture to support the concerned population base.

This subset of the Chinese population has all the rights to get angry on its precarious situation. And remember, they access the Internet, text to the community and have a presence on the social media. A catch 22 situation indeed!

Social media, even if regulated, is giving Chinese administrators nightmares. Information is flowing. Wukan happened and we know it or to say it more aptly – Wukan happened because we, out of China, know it. Thousands of workers of a Taiwanese shoe factory in Dongguan went on strike against salary cut and sacking in November 2011. Factory workers clashed with the police. Photographs of bloodied workers circulated over the Internet reaching to us, out of China. This incident further incited strikes and protests at other outfits. We still know of the 3-day strike by Chengdu steelworkers though the state controlled Chinese media kept quiet about it. There are many more similar case studies to bolster the claim here.

I had been to an international seminar last year, organized at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The theme was ‘Information and Communication Technology and Development’. A fine Chinese thinker’s paper was on how growing base of information and communication technologies is creating layers (classes) in the Chinese society. It was really an eye-opening analysis. Though his analysis hinges more around widening gap of ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’ based on the pattern of information consumption, it also tells how the flow of information is becoming significant in the Chinese society with an ever increasing number of people logging-in and connecting on the networks.

Then there are other head-on factors. Do some simple googling on ‘China’s power transition’ and you would come across plenty of analyses seeing the crisis days ahead.

Continued..

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/