But it is happening at five times the speed To its credit, too, the new leaders are evidently very worried about inequality and seek to do something about it.But it is impossible not to be troubled. You do not need to listen hard to hear of serious corruption. The once-admired free health service has been replaced by a paid-for one. Though there is an insurance scheme, for most working people it does not cover the full cost of treatment. China seems to have embraced the unpleasant aspects of the market economy with the same unquestioning vigour that it is enjoying the goodies the market economy pumps out.And the impact on the rest of us? Well, at one level the rest of the world should be relieved that this great nation is racing to decent prosperity It is impossible not to admire the vigour and the optimism. It is impossible, also, not to admire the open concern among ordinary citizens about the costs of this race to wealth.But this is a wild ride and there is every possibility of it ending in some kind of crash. The people who now crowd the shopping malls grew up living with their parents in one room with no running water "We were lucky," a young Shanghai friend told me. "Our family didn't have to share a room." She got a good degree, came to Europe for her Masters, and now is living a life that in most practical ways is the same as any young professional in Europe or America.But with booms come busts. The Chinese boom has yet to bust, for the country has continued to grow through the global downturn even more swiftly than it did during the late 1990s. To visit Beijing and Shanghai, as I did last week, is to understand how visitors to Manchester must have felt in 1850, when they saw the new steam-powered factories for the first time. But it is happening at five times the speed.If it is exhilarating to catch a glimpse of this transformation as a visitor, it must be all the more exhilarating to experience it as a Chinese citizen.
This is what is happening in China. China is the biggest boom on earth. It is not just the fastest-growing economy in the world at this moment; its boom is the greatest that has ever occurred in the history of humankind. The world has never seen economic growth on this scale before. Some quarter of a billion people are racing from bare subsistence to middle-class comfort in less than two decades, the sort of transformation of living standards that took a century in Britain's Industrial Revolution. Imagine Heathrow getting both its new terminal and a new runway in the next 18 months. And now imagine this happening not just in London but on almost as big a scale in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and another half dozen regional centres. Imagine a new office and hotel development five times the size of London's Canary Wharf, built in half the time Imagine a new Bluewater shopping mall being added each year. What we elected to do was make Awja a fish bowl so we could see who was swimming inside."¿ An American patrol opened fire yesterday on people in Baghdad's gun market, killing three, including an 11-year-old boy, after the soldiers mistook the gunfire of customers testing weapons for an attack, a witness and an Iraqi police officer said.. A young policeman said over the wire barricade: "It will make the resistance stronger. Even those who did not fight when the Americans came to Iraq are being pushed to join the resistance." The American military yesterday proved unable to provide The Independent with any comment on the enclosing of Awja. But Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell of the 4th Infantry Division, who came up with the scheme, told The Washington Post in an interview last week: "The insurgents should not be allowed to swim among the population as a whole. Why us? There's been resistance all over Iraq." In the case of Awja, the Americans appear to have resorted to this strategy after concluding they have no hope of winning over the people.Similar tactics against the Palestinian intifada by Israel, which has sealed off towns and villages in the occupied territories for many months, have been widely criticised within the international community and human rights organisations as counter-productive.The Americans have decided they have little to lose by sealing the town off in the hope that it will stifle guerrilla activity Residents seem to think the approach is doomed to fail. In Awja, the crackdown is less photogenic, but as significant. On 30 October, two rifle companies from the US army's 4th Infantry Division turned up at night and sealed off the town."We were asleep," recalled Mohammed Shakr al-Nassiri, 33, a shopkeeper "We did hear some work going on during the night When we got up, we found all this barbed wire around us We don't understand the point of it. |
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