The following article has been posted on many Chinese websites under different titles. The extensive posting on China’s heavily censored websites and blogs indicates a widespread public acceptance of the article; it also indicates that the ruling regime feels a real sense of political crisis. In this scholarly article, both nationalism and the anti-western sentiment found in traditional propaganda have been blended together. China is portrayed as a grief-stricken victim, not of its own regime, or of the breakdown of morality in China, but of lustful western exploitation that has expended all its natural and human resources to contribute to the welfare of the West and of the rest of the world. The West is cited as a scapegoat for all the current problems that China faces: the prevalence of tainted food, slave-labor wages, the prevalence of crime and prostitution, the outrageous environmental degradations, wanton corruption, the lack of occupational safety, the heavy losses in the financial sector, and even why China’s wealthy transfer their assets abroad. Below is an unabridged translation of the Chinese original. Chinascope has not been able to verify the authorship. [1]
Author: Professor Zhang Hongliang of Central University of Nationalities
Currently the Chinese people, taking establishing a harmonious society as a symbol, are returning to the struggle of the Garden of Eden. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, politically the big Western powers carved China up. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, China’s economy is, again, being carved up by the big Western powers. What’s different now is that at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, big Western powers used various treaties to carve us up. Now the big Western powers are using various regulations to carve us up. The main sign that China has been carved up is that China is becoming a heedlessly milked "cow" of the Western developed countries. International capital monopolies have inserted wealth-sucking straws fully throughout China’s body, which sustains destructive developments that cut off our offspring’s resources. The result is that gigantic wealth is flowing to the developed Western countries like a big river. China has upgraded the standard of life in developed Western countries and has led the economic growth of the entire world, but in doing so has solely sacrificed the benefits of the Chinese people—not only the benefits of the people of this generation, but even more scarily, it has exhausted the foundation of our offspring’s resources.
It can be said that sacrificing the foundation of our offspring’s resources in exchange for a generation’s riches is already a type of crime, much less that this generation of Chinese people has not even enjoyed the benefits. They have been completely consumed by this generation of westerners. This is why, while in thirty years of development, Japan’s wages caught up with the U.S.’s, but China’s wages are only 3% of the American wage. This is why (according to the latest statistics) the top 0.02% who control 70% of China’s wealth go all out to transfer their assets and their relatives abroad. This is why in the process of rapid economic growth, the Chinese people have again sunk under the oppression of the "three mountains."[2] Furthermore, international capitalist monopolies have already developed a plan to kill the cow after milking it dry. This is done through the use of hedge control of the stock market and the money market to roll up all the last capital remnants.
{mospagebreak}
1. Looking at it from the whole economic volume, the world economic engine that is China has contributed its resources, its environment and its citizens’ health to the astonishing growth of western countries’ wealth, so that three of the nine fortune forums were held in China. For the fourth consecutive year, China has driven the world’s 15% economic growth with only 4% of the world’s GDP. The four-year total contribution China has made to the world’s GDP is approximately 1.5 trillion USD, which is equivalent to 12 trillion Chinese Yuan. According to last year’s national wage standard, it is equivalent to more than six years of total wages of city and town workers in the entire country. China’s huge contribution to the world’s economy is most obviously seen in the frantic increase of international energy prices. China’s imports in recent years have resulted in a 70% average annual increase in the price of the world’s mining products. The cost of international sea transportation has increased even more, averaging a frantic 170% growth per year. The frantic rise in prices of goods imported into China and the frantic drop of China export prices has become one of the most inconceivable anomalies in the history of world economic development.
China’s contribution to Asia is even more astounding. One hundred percent of Asia’s export growth has come from China. It was China that pushed Asia out of its 1998 financial crisis. This is especially so with the major Asian economic power of Japan, which has kept its annual export growth to China at double digits ever since the turn of the 21st century. Exports to China have accounted for approximately 70% of Japan’s export growth. Japan admitted itself that "trade with China sustained Japan’s export-led economic rebound," and is an important reason for Japan’s freeing itself from the quagmire and for its recovery toward a prosperous economy.
But economic development has a price. In this world, there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. The price for its huge contribution to the world, and Asia, including Japan, is the catastrophic destruction of China’s resources and environment. 80% of rivers and lakes have dried up; two-thirds of China’s grassland has been desertified; an overwhelming majority of China’s forests have disappeared; almost 100% of China’s soil has hardened and become impervious. According to statistics from Japan’s customs, for ten-plus years, China’s annual chopstick export to Japan required the cutting down of more than two million trees. The total number of chopsticks China exported to Japan in a decade was approximately 224.3 billion pairs. According to China forestry’s expert calculations, the amount of mountain forests destroyed to produce these chopsticks accounted more than 20% of China’s land.
At the same time that resources are being depleted, China’s ecological system is facing more and more threats. One-third of China’s soil has been polluted by acid rain; two-fifths of China’s major river systems have already become the five categories of bad water. More than 300 million farmers have no safe water to drink. More than 400 million city dwellers have been breathing in heavily polluted air. Fifteen million people have developed bronchitis and respiratory tract cancer as a result. The World Bank reported that China has sixteen of the twenty most seriously polluted cities in the world. Two-thirds of the 668 cities in China are surrounded by trash. This trash not only occupies ever more farming land, but threatens the basic living environment. Under the circumstance of not being able to treat the accumulating domestic trash, China is still wantonly importing trash from the developed Western countries. China has become the Western developed countries’ dump yard for emptying trash. One of three major U.S. exports to China is trash. It is also the one export with the largest growth rate. In some southern regions where trash has been imported, animals have become fully extinct; plants have been seriously mutated; and people’s health is deteriorating daily. In some regions, for many years there hasn’t been a single military enlistee who passed [his or her] physical examine.
{mospagebreak}
Looking at only the economic accounts, the losses are also quite astounding. In 2003 alone, the economic losses brought about by China’s environmental pollution and ecological destruction accounted for 15% of the year’s GDP. At the same time that we contributed to 15% of the world economic growth, we have deducted 15% from ourselves each year.
Not only has China’s natural environment worsened; so has its social environment. From 1979 to 2003, the crime rate rose six fold from 0.55 per thousand to 3.41 per thousand. Its annual growth rate is 7%. If we take into consideration the ever lowering standards for placing a file for investigation and prosecution, there is an even greater disparity. The societal death rate has increased from 44 per million in 1979 to 106 per million. The annual growth rate is 3.5%. In 2003, the rate of contagious disease outbreak announced by the Public Health Department increased 6.7% over the previous year; the death rate increased 37%. The Chinese people went from not knowing what an anti-burglary door and window were to installing anti-burglary doors and windows up to and above the 7th floor. Because ruffians are everywhere and are impossible to defend against effectively, industries nationwide have long stopped arranging night shifts for female workers. Poisonous food has already covered 100% of all industries. Only heaven knows what people are swallowing down their throats every day. Sexual promiscuity has spread to preschool-aged children. One can only imagine the future of their bodies and their lifespans.
Approximately 20 million young girls have been forced into prostitution. Their income accounts for 6% of the GDP, which is equivalent to over one trillion Yuan. This phenomenon is unique in world history. The average height of Chinese people is 2.5 cm shorter than Japanese people. Little Japan has really become "great Japan." According to GotoRead, there is one industrial accident related death for every 100 million Yuan GDP. In 2003, 136,000 people died from industrial injuries. At this rate, this year’s industrial deaths will reach 200,000. It is in reality as well as in name "a bloody GDP." Actually, this number is only the tip of the iceberg: a death figure from published statistics, which only includes state-owned industries and major accidents that involve a relatively large number of deaths. In private and foreign industries, ordinary deaths involving several people never make it to the statistics bureau at all. But the number of workers employed in private and foreign industries far surpasses the number in state-owned industries. When this factor is taken into consideration, the number of deaths each year is at least equivalent to a Nanking Massacre.
2. Looking solely from foreign trade, China’s astounding transfusion of wealth to developed Western countries has already made China sink into the saddest condition of colonialism. China’s export prices are so low that they’re almost free. Historically, other than the white people going to Africa to capture blacks for free, there has not been a single colony that has plundered in trade to such an extent. Referencing [prices] in foreign trade and prices in developed countries, one will find that foreign businessmen take over 95% of the profits of foreign trade. Last year, our country exported 17.7 billion articles of clothing. On the average, each garment costs only 3.51 USD, and each pair of shoes costs less than 2.50 USD. The price for a popular Barbie doll on the U.S. market is 10 USD. China’s industry in Suzhou only received 35 cents. Logitech sends to the U.S. 20 million "made-in-China" mice every year. The selling price for these mice is approximately 40 USD. China only receives 3 USD for each mouse. Workers’ wages, the costs of energy, transportation, and other regular costs are all included in this 3 USD.
{mospagebreak}
It is with this less-than-five-percent profit that we accumulated the one trillion USD foreign exchange reserve, which implies that we have, at the same time, contributed twenty trillion USD in capital to international monopolies. On the fifth anniversary of China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), China Central TV repeatedly broadcasted that in the five years since China joined the WTO, it saved American families one-fifth of their living expenses. A survey by Morgan Stanley also indicated that American consumers have saved 100 billion dollars by buying China’s cheap products. The Japanese throw away Chinese chopsticks because buying is cheaper than washing. Also because it’s too cheap, Japan, which has long stopped burning coal; it has imported more than 20 million tons of coal to fill the sea and turn it into a man-made coal energy reserve. What the flood of China’s cheap disposable products into Western countries has destroyed is China’s resources. Even some people of conscience in the Western countries have been shocked, calling in succession for a change in disposable consumption, and sincerely advising China to protect its resources.
Foreign businessmen have taken an overwhelming majority of profits. Foreign industries operating in China have sucked the lifeblood of workers by lowering costs. After the Foxconn incident, America’s Apple Computer and UK’s Financial Times came to China in succession. Their reports indicated that Foxconn’s 150,000 female workers worked over 15 hours a day and earned less than 50 USD a month, which is less than two hours of wages compared to their American counterparts. The timeliness of receiving even such meager wages is a variable. Such low wages have turned workers in current society completely into slaves in a slave society. The reason that the overwhelming majority of young women and young men can work for next to nothing for a sustained period of time is because they dream of becoming a city dweller (i.e. a registered city resident) one day. To them, working for next to nothing is not scary. What’s scary is industrial injuries and disabilities. With 95% of the profits taken by foreign businessmen, proprietors can’t pay for labor protection at all. Injuries and disabilities have thus become a worker’s most fearful nightmare.
Endnotes:
[1] Boxun, June 9, 2008
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2008/06/200806092153.shtml
[2] The "three mountains" refers to the difficulties in seeing a doctor, in getting an education, and in securing a dwelling.