In Understanding China, John Starr explores China’s economic, historical, and political culture. He does this is a succinct 323 pages, focusing primarily on China’s modern era since the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. Mr. Starr states his goals for the book as: 1) exploring the principal problems confronting China today, 2) determining the ability of China to deal with these problems, and 3) offering some suggestions as to how the political picture may play itself out in the near term. While the book may not be very enlightening for a well-versed Chinese historian, I found the content to be engaging, educational, and (most importantly) predominantly neutral.
In his book, Mr. Starr explores issues surrounding all facets of Chinese society, including those domestic and international, rural and urban, government and private sector, financial and social in nature. The book begins with an examination of China’s geography, noting some important contrasts with the United States, including the two countries’ western borders, the comparatively large percentage of uninhabitable land in China, and the drastic disparity in infrastructure. He goes on to speak about the impact that the great scholars of Chinese history (notably Confucius) still have on society today. Many of Confucius’ teachings emphasized the importance of discipline and order, clearly still a high priority for the government (and for many residents) in the modern era.
In the following section, Mr. Starr discusses the always-controversial topic of China’s political system. I found one of his most compelling arguments to be the fact that Americans tend to “compare the American ideal (often very different from American practice) to Chinese practice (often falling far short of Chinese ideals).” While it is easy to rant and rave about the lack of certain freedoms in contemporary Chinese society, it is important to remember the drastic progressions that the country has made over the past 20 years. The author explains the high level of control in which the CCP has over nearly all social matters, and he introduces the reader to the term “Party-state” to describe this politically dominated culture. Towards the end of the chapter, Mr. Starr offers a one-sentence summary of the political system in place in China today: “imperfectly formed braches of government with significantly unequal power and no effective balance or check on one another.”
The content then moves to China’s economy where, once again, the government dominates the discussion. At the time the book was written, the State owned about sixty thousand industrial enterprises and employed approximately thirty million people. However, a large portion of that workforce was underemployed, and an alarmingly high percentage of State run businesses were operating in the red. Most worrisome is the banking industry, where some 25% of loans were estimated to be underperforming, amounting to about a quarter of the country’s GNP.
In a chapter about rural discontent in China, I found it alarming that a 1990 census revealed some 205 million people in China (~ 18% of the population) were illiterate. School is not provided for free in rural China and, sadly, many parents decide to pull their children out of school at a young age for financial reasons. In a subsequent section on human rights, I found Mr. Starr’s comparison of America’s rule of law (where law stands above the individual) versus China’s rule of men (where individual men/women stand above the law) to be quite interesting. At the end of this section, he makes a strong stand against the use of trade sanctions as a means of punishing China for human rights violations: “Trade sanctions cannot be crafted in such a way as to hurt those in the Party-state responsible for the violation of the civil rights of dissidents and cannot avoid penalizing the very sectors of Chinese society that are most receptive to the ideas we want to promote.”
Towards the end of the book, there was a detailed discussion of the SARs of Hong Kong and Macao, and of the province of Taiwan. What I found most interesting in this portion of the book was the in depth discussion of the roots of Taiwan’s political system, and how different ideals across the two cultures often pit them against one another. Dialogue on the merits of the “one country, two systems” mentality versus complete Taiwanese liberation is likely to continue for decades to come, and Mr. Starr’s section on this topic helped introduce the tip of the iceberg to an unapprised reader (like myself).
I have just done a large disservice to Mr. Starr’s efforts by glossing over (and completely skipping) very important and interesting portions of Understanding China. However, I only have five pages for this report, and I would like to discuss some of the questions that Mr. Starr raises in his book.
While reading Understanding China, the reader cannot help but form some opinions as to which of the problems he/she thinks the country needs to address first. I would like to focus my attention on what I feel is China’s most pressing issue today: raising the standard of living among the country’s masses. Around 2001 (when the book was published), the average household income in rural China was less than $950 per year. Among the country’s urban population, that figure rises to only $3,000 per year. China’s GDP per capita in 2005 was $1,703, ranking the country 110th among 180 member countries of the IMF that provide the data; the United States ranked 8th on that list with a GDP per capita of $42,101. Although one can argue the merits of using the GDP/capita ratio as a proper measure for comparing standards of living, it is safe to say that China has a lot of room for improving the living standards within its borders.
The easy answer to increase the standard of living in China (and the answer too often suggested by ill-informed Americans) is to simply privatize industry, provide incentives for investment, and (of course) float the country’s currency. Sounds easy enough, right? True, floating the Yuan would instantaneously make all Chinese richer than they are today (by increasing the purchasing power of their domestic currency overseas). However, this would only provide a one-time boost to the overall wealth of the country; it would not (by itself) help to increase the countrywide standard of living in the long run. As for privatizing industry and incentivizing investment, both are good options on paper, but there is a very serious moral question about what to do about the tens of millions of State employees who would become unemployed as a result of these actions. Although China’s long-run economic blueprint should include plans for increasing privatization, inducing investment, and floating the Yuan, I believe that wholly adopting any of these policies at one time would be too drastic of a measure.
As a graduate student in my 19th year of classroom education, I am a big proponent of education by nature. I think one of the big reasons that Americans enjoy the high standard of living that we do is the high level of education achieved by the general public. The statistics presented in Table 9 on page 224 of the book were astonishing: only 20% of Chinese enroll in high school (compared to 90% of Americans), and only 3% enroll in college or university (vs. 40% of Americans). I think one of the first things China needs to do is improve its school system and find a way to provide secondary education to its rural and urban residents. For China to become a more affluent country, they will need a hardworking, well-educated workforce ready to tackle the deeply entrenched economical problems facing the country today.
Of course, once you have a well-educated workforce, you need to provide incentives for that workforce to innovate, progress, and succeed. This is where some privatization of industry will be imperative; the individual needs to know that hard work and dedication can result in an increase in social status and personal wealth. For better or worse, this pursuit of personal gain is more-or-less human nature, so if an employee does not see his/her potential to ascend, his/her motivation to perform can be stifled. In a predominantly state-driven society as China has in place today, I do not think that residents necessarily see the correlation between hard work and personal gain; they do not have an equivalent of the “American dream” that we are all so familiar with in our country. As emphasized earlier, however, this privatization needs to be a progressive, long-term series of events, not an instantaneous conversion to a market society.
In the conclusion to his book, Mr. Starr suggests that the downfall of the Party-state (similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union) is a potential course of events in the somewhat near term. He offers a rather grim outlook for the time ahead: “In sum, regardless of which of these other circumstances comes to pass, China has a protracted and problematic time ahead.” I hope Mr. Starr is wrong in his latter assessment, but I look forward to a deeper understanding of the country and its culture in the weeks to come.