The China Panic - Democratic Underground

JackRiddler

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Tue Apr-26-11 03:15 AM
Original message

The China Panic

Edited on Tue Apr-26-11 03:25 AM by JackRiddler

2010 Nominal GDP, in dollars:

US = almost 15 trillion USD
China = almost 6 trillion USD

Population
US = 300 million
China = 1.6 billion

Area: About equivalent.

Environmental degradation caused per unit time: Soon also to be equivalent.

Now the IMF predicts China's GDP will achieve parity with the US GDP in 2016.

I worry about poisoning the oceans and the die-off of species and atmospheric emissions and resource depletion and the fall in fresh-water levels. I worry about nuclear war and the consequences of "peaceful" nuclear energy. I worry about global class war and the many hot wars and corporate rule and dictatorships and the thousand injustices that the world's peoples suffer, in China worse even than elsewhere. I look for ways to stand with my sisters and brothers in the Chinese labor colonies that produce for the bloated multinational conglomerates, the common enemies of humankind.

These tend not to be issues on which the IMF issues urgent declarations.

I don't worry about China's rulers getting a turn to play Number One on top of this planetary shitpile, which is experiencing a global crisis, as the economy is based on unsustainable practices and the civilization is recklessly destroying its own ecological basis.

I don't expect too many DU people to be invested in the China panic propaganda. It smells so familiar, after seeing the Soviet threat and the Japanese threat and now even the Terra-ist threat come and go.

True, a mere devaluation of the dollar by one-half (nothing that remarkable in historic terms) and a couple more years of differential growth would make the Chinese GDP equivalent to the US, although China would still have five times the population. (Such a shift would also have some dramatic consequences on Chinese currency reserves and export markets, and who knows all the dominoes that would tumble, and what the result would be.)

Achieving GDP parity in nominal terms would hardly make China into the new world overlord. There will be no new single overlord.

I say the current vintage of China Panic is part of the ongoing neoliberal offensive to force through greater austerity in the United States (but without tax increases or cuts in "defense").

In the China Panic, the IMF and the major ratings agencies (who are criminally culpable for the Wall Street financial frauds and the crash of 2008, and should have been shut down as a result) are singing in tune with what the American billionaires and policymaking elite are already pushing as "inevitable."

Their idea of dealing with "the crisis of US power" is not to withdraw the 800 overseas bases and end the multiple wars and occupations, or to invest in the urgently necessary energy and transport conversions, but to cut pensions and health plans and wages, and it certainly is not to restore a measure of income equality and thus the ability of the people to exert demand.

Their idea of what is to be done is to bust unions, to lengthen working hours and make even more people redundant, and for the public sector to stop paying for libraries and colleges. They would apply the same program they've disastrously imposed on dozens of poor nations around the globe.

When that happens, when 2/3 of the American people are impoverished, then the IMF and Co. will discover that the US is in much better shape as an economy than they thought, and still a totally important and indispensable Leader of the World.

The real question is growing ancient: Socialism or barbarism?

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