The British Chamber of Commerce last week sent me a UK government summary of the European Chamber of Commerce's latest 'position paper' on China. It concluded with the refreshingly frank statement:
"The litany of foreign business complaints in China has barely changed in two years. There has been some patchy progress, but retrenchment in almost equal measure."
By coincidence, the very same day, a friend forwarded me a link to an item (on a China news site I hadn't previously known about) headed China is world's 3rd-wealthies nation (sic). Credit Suisse, apparently, is now predicting that China will overtake Japan as the world's second wealthiest nation by the end of 2016, although it will still have slightly less than half the GDP of the USA. Moreover, this report notes, just a mite Chinglishly, that, "accumulation of fortune will happen alongside the expansion of wealth gap"; i.e., the country's Gini coefficient of income distribution is going off the charts.
But, as the 'academic' I was editing for last week assures us, the Gini coefficient and other such indicators of economic and social instability are 'Western concepts' and DO NOT APPLY to China, because.... well, they just don't. China is different, OK?
The laws of physics only apply selectively here as well, a fact that has been much exploited in the construction of dams and nuclear power stations.
2 comments:
From the outside looking in, sometimes it seems that the Chinese -- unconsciously? -- take it for granted that a large enough population can absorb any looming catastrophe. Rather like the WW1 approach to victory: mere machine guns and poison-gas bombardments are no match for a certain number of bodies, right?
Tell that to THE ENVIRONMENT.
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