Jottings from the Granite Studio

Signs that not all is well in today’s China A-Go-Go, from today’s IHT:

BEIJING: Protests and riots have become the most destabilizing factor in China and pose a challenge to the Communist Party’s ability to rule, the official Xinhua news agency said Friday.

Xinhua called for “prudent” use of force in handling “mass incidents” — an official euphemism for protests and riots — after the police shot and killed at least three demonstrators a year ago.

China has been grappling with outbreaks of unrest for several years, as three decades of market reforms have lifted living standards, but also widened the gaps between the rich and poor, the urban and rural.

Resentment over the loss of farmland, corruption, worsening pollution, arbitrary evictions by property developers and layoffs by state enterprises has galvanized Chinese to take sometimes drastic action.

It’s tempting to see these incidents as “reactions to authoritarian rule,” and the government is certainly a part of the problem. But it’s also important to remember that what seems to set people off are the bread-and-butter (or rice-and-tofu, if you will) issues of an economy surging forward without the necessary legal, environmental, or social structures in place to deal with the effects of China’s economic growth. To get rich used to be a glorious thing. Now it’s the only thing.

And there ARE winners in this game. The Financial Times ran an article today on what it takes to be among the world’s wealthiest (less than you might think):

Research published this week by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-Wider) showed that an adult needed to own $61,000 of net assets to be in the richest 10 per cent of the world’s wealth distribution and that in 2000, Chinese people represented less than 1-in-100 of this group.

That might be the case right now, but the same study suggests the Chinese will rapidly make ground in this global competition:

But such is the pace of development that Professor Anthony Shorrocks of UNU-Wider thinks that China will soon have more people in this group than Japan. The Japanese currently account for a fifth of the world’s top 10 per cent. Mr Shorrocks said “it won’t take very much for China to displace Japan as the second placed country”, because millions of Chinese already have wealth a little below the levels needed to be in the richest 10 per cent, their wealth is rising quickly, their savings rates are high and it is likely that Chinese wealth will become less equally shared, propelling a large elite towards the top of the global league.

According to the IHT article, nearly 3.8 million people took part in ‘mass disturbances.’ For every 10 lattes sold to China’s new urban elite, there is one pissed off farmer who just lost his last acre to a developer in bed with the local official who has himself turned a deaf ear to Beijing’s anti-corruption directives.