By Bradley M. Gardner
Published by the Independent Institute in 2017
A review
According
to a 2015 article in the Washington Post,
China used more concrete in the three years between 2011 and 2013 than the
United States used in the 20th Century. In his book, China’s Great Migration Bradley M. Garner credits this tremendous
development primarily to 260 million Chinese who migrated from the countryside
to China’s cities to work at industrial jobs. This number of migrant workers
exceeds the number of immigrant workers in the world.
Bradley
Gardner works for the State Department of the United States. He believes that
the capitalist system is the ultimate way for humanity to advance. So, in reading
this book, I felt the need to effectively translate Gardner’s ideas into a
language that working people will find relevant.
In
order to gain a perspective to this book, I feel it is useful to look at an
outline of hundreds of years of Chinese history.
Tremendous projects are not new to China
Huge
projects are not new to China. China’s Great Wall spans about 3,700 miles. To
put this in perspective, the distance from New York City to Los Angeles,
California is less than 3,000 miles.
China’s
Grand Canal is the longest human made waterway in the world. It spans 1,104
miles. While the Panama Canal is considerably wider, its length is about 50
miles.
From
1405 to 1433 China had a fleet of about 300 ships that sailed across the Indian
Ocean to Africa. The largest ship was 300 feet long and 150 feet wide. One of
those ships was larger than the three ships used by Christopher Columbus to
sail to the Americas in 1492.
China,
as well as Korea, invented the printing press that transformed printing in the
world. Throughout the Greek and Roman Empires all literature was written by
hand.
China
also has a long history in medical as well as agricultural research.
So,
before we can look at the question of why China has had such astronomical
growth, first I think we need to look at another question. Why did China go
from being the most developed nation in the world, to become an effective
colony to European powers?
European development
In
his book 1493 – Uncovering the new worldColumbus created Charles C. Mann wrote about an important chapter in
Chinese history.
In
the year 1545 Diego Gualpa discovered a deposit of silver at the southern tip
of Bolivia. This turned out to be the largest discovery of silver in the world.
The
Spanish had three goals in their colonization of the Americas. These were God,
Glory, and Gold. So, this discovery of silver sparked changes throughout the
world.
In
Europe the mining of gold and silver in by Native American slave labor led to
the financing of the industrial revolution. The European discovery of potatoes
in the Americas allowed farmers to spend less time tending to their crops. This
allowed for a migration into the factories of European cities.
While
China had a highly developed economy for those times, it had one weakness. The
Chinese currency was unstable.
So,
when Spanish ships landed in their colony, the Philippines, loaded with silver,
the Chinese made it a top priority to trade anything and everything for those
sixty-pound bars of silver.
This
trade became such a priority, the Chinese Emperor ordered farmers to plant
mulberry trees that would feed silk worms used to make silk to be transported
to Europe. Trades people in Europe went out of business because they were
unable to compete with imported goods transported from China half a world away.
As
in Europe, the introduction of American crops to China transformed that nation.
Areas that hadn’t been used for cultivation could now be used to grow sweet
potatoes, potatoes, and corn. This development allowed the Chinese population
to grow significantly.
The Opium Wars and 100 years of rebellions against imperialism
Starting
in the 1600s momentous changes began to unfold in Europe. Up until that point,
Europe had been ruled by feudal monarchies. This meant that only those who were
born into these monarchies had full rights.
Those
monarchies forced peasants who worked the land to live on manors for their
entire lives. The word villain comes
from those peasants who had permission to travel away from the manor.
Craft
guilds controlled all manufacturing that was by its nature primarily designed
to fulfill the needs of the royal families. Under these conditions the Royal
families ruled in conjunction with religious clerics.
Then,
beginning in the 1600s a new class emerged that would eventually take power
away from the royal families. This class of doctors, lawyers, bankers,
journalists, and entrepreneurs would change society from one designed to
benefit the royal families, to one designed to gouge out profits for the owners
of corporations.
While
feudal societies had limited production facilities, under the new system of
capitalism mass production factories began to take hold. This meant that the
laws needed to change in order to allow peasants to leave the land in order to
work in the factories located in cities. This also meant that workers would
experience nightmarish conditions in the first years of capitalist production.
Spain
never developed and industrial base. Aside from relying on China, most of the
immense wealth Spain collected from Native American slave labor went to the
other European nations.
Britain
became the world’s superpower, but that nation had a problem. Because China was
self sufficient, the British didn’t manufacture anything the Chinese wanted. As
a result the Chinese initially became wealthy in British silver because of the
trade imbalance.
We
should keep in mind that China never had a pro-capitalist transformation as
many European powers experienced. Instead, the deteriorating Chinese monarchy
was conquered by the minority nationality known as the Manchus. This meant that
masses of Chinese peasants remained on the land and China became relatively
underdeveloped with respect to Europe.
The
British dealt with their trade imbalance with China by selling opium. The
Manchu Emperor began to understand that opium was a drain on their economy and
it’s use ruined many lives. So, the Manchu Emperor banned the importation of
opium.
The
British responded by doubling its opium exports to China. The Chinese eventually
responded to this illegal trade by boarding a British vessel and throwing an
expensive shipment of opium overboard. This act was similar to the Boston Tea
Party when colonists of the thirteen colonies protested unfair taxes by
boarding a British vessel and throwing a shipment of tea overboard.
This
act sparked the beginning of three Opium Wars where the British forced the Chinese
to continue to purchase opium. The British also forced the Manchu rulers to pay
for the opium that the Chinese had thrown into the sea.
We
should keep in mind that the primary concern of the Manchu rulers was not to
free China from this trade, but to maintain their positions of privilege in the
country. Had the Chinese people been mobilized, they could have easily defeated
the British. However, that kind of mobilization would have jeopardized the
position of the Manchu rulers.
The
Chinese defeat in the Opium Wars had a horrendous effect on the country.
Resources that had been used to feed the people were used to pay the debt to
Britain. As a result the Taiping Rebellion erupted. 20 million Chinese might
have perished in the war. However, the Manchus, with British support were able
to maintain power.
Many
Chinese from the southeast of the country looked to escape from the horrors of
the Taiping Rebellion and came to the United States to mine gold and to aid in
the construction of the railroad.
The
defeat of the Taiping Rebellion, as well as British domination of the economy
led to more horrors in China. Mike Davis wrote a book titled: Late Victorian Holocausts, where he
documented the fact that during the late 1800s about 30 million Chinese starved
to death.
Davis
looked at how the Chinese dealt with droughts before the British dominated
their country. When there was a drought in one part of China, the Grand Canal
was used to transport food throughout the country. However, the British had no
interest in maintaining a waterway that would only benefit Chinese, and made no
effort to transport food to the starving Chinese people.
These
horrendous conditions sparked the Boxer Rebellion, the Nationalist Rebellion of
1910, the rebellion of 1927, and finally the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
The
1910 rebellion or revolution made the political organization the Kuomintang a political
force. Sun Yat-sen was the first leader of the Kuomintang and his successor was
Chiang Kai-shek.
In
the revolution of 1927 the Chinese Communist Party became a political force.
However, this party was aligned with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
That party had betrayed the goals of the Russian Revolution and was headed by
Joseph Stalin.
Stalin
urged the Chinese Communists to support Chiang Kai-shek, who at that time had
aligned himself with imperialist interests. As a result, the Kuomintang
organized to destroy the Communist Party and thousands of its members were
murdered. China’s famous Long March
was an arduous effort of the Communist Party to escape from the advancing
Kuomintang.
At
this time the Chinese Communist Party had an opportunity to take power on it’s
own, but that opportunity was lost because of miss-leadership. Had the Chinese
working class taken power at that time, Chinese history might have been
completely different. As it was, the Chinese Communist Party developed a strategy
based on the peasants and not the workers. This would have a horrendous effect
in the years to come.
After
the Second World War, financiers demanded payment for loans they made in
support of the Chinese independence struggle against Japan. These demands for
payment on loans created astronomical inflation throughout China. These
conditions caused most Chinese to abandon the Kuomintang. As a result the
Chinese Communist Party took power in a relatively bloodless revolution in
1949.
The Chinese Communist Party takes power
William
H. Hinton reported on the change that took place in a Chinese village because
of the revolution in his book Fanshen. Women
were no longer forced to have their feet bound and broken. Peasants who
routinely lived in extreme poverty experienced an improved standard of living.
All of this was because of a more rational organization of the village.
However,
the government of Mao Zedong was not about creating a workers democracy. That
government attempted initially to create a block
of four classes. These classes consisted of workers, peasants, capitalists,
and landlords.
Once
the revolution triumphed capitalists and landlords mobilized to defend their
interests. Mao understood that he needed to counter this mobilization and he nationalized
all major Chinese corporations, as well as the property of large landowners. As
a result, capitalists refused to invest in China for many years.
Because
Mao was determined to carry out his top down leadership, it was inevitable that
his policies would end in disaster. First came his Great Leap Forward that might have cost the lives of millions of
Chinese. Then came his Cultural
Revolution that forced millions of Chinese intellectuals and young people
to move to the countryside and engage in farming.
Initially
China supported the Korean people against the invasion of their country by the
United States. Then, China supported Vietnam in their war to defend their
nation from U.S. aggression. However, Mao was not motivated by international
solidarity, and this became clear with his actions.
While
the United States carried out a horrendous bombing campaign towards the end of
their war against Vietnam, Mao met with U.S. President Richard Nixon. Mao also
supported the monstrous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia
to oust the Khmer Rouge, China responded by invading Vietnam.
These
actions, as well as the death of Mao Zedong led to momentous changes in China.
Bradley M. Gardner documented many of these changes in his book China’s Great Migration.
Gardner
reported that the percentage of the Chinese economy controlled by the state in
1998 was 60.5 percent. By the year 2010 the Chinese government controlled a
mere 19.4 percent of the economy. Gardner credits this immense change to the migration
of about 260 million Chinese from the countryside to the cities.
We
should keep in mind that China had never experienced a capitalist revolution.
Because of this, Chinese authorities forced peasants to remain on the land
where they were born for their entire lives. Remarkably, the government of Mao
Zedong continued to enforce these horrendous regulations.
Gardner
reported on the Chinese system of Hukou that explains the background to the
great migration. These were the regulations that restricted the travel of
Chinese who lived in the countryside. The regulations of Hukou needed to be
reformed in order to allow for mass migration to the cities. However, remnants
of this system remain in effect in China today.
This
means that Chinese access to health care, education, housing, and pension are
all regulated by where a Chinese citizen was born. So, Chinese traveling from
the countryside to the cities to work in factories are, from a legal point of
view, second-class citizens.
This
system might make us think that the Chinese government would prevent any
confiscations of the homes where people live. However, Gardner pointed out that
one of the primary means that local governments have of raising funds is
through confiscations of Chinese homes.
Gardner
gave the example of Jia Lingmin, who protested the confiscation of her home.
She was then kidnapped, and thrown into a ditch. Her home was eventually
confiscated after she waged a long battle to prevent a forced evacuation.
Lingmin then conducted an educational campaign to prevent further forced
evacuations. The government eventually responded to her efforts by sentencing
her to four and one half years in prison.
We
can see similarities to this reality in the United States and other capitalist
nations. In the U.S., they call forced evacuations eminent domain. There is also institutionalized discrimination
against Blacks, women, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as immigrants.
Funding for education varies widely between the urban centers and the affluent
suburban communities. In China this discrimination is based on the location of
where people are born.
China’s great migration
Gardner
places China’s great migration in an international context in the following
paragraph:
“Between
1800 and 1900 the population of London expanded from 1 Million to 4.5 million,
while between 1890 and 1930, immigrants and rural migrants pushed New York’s
population up from 2.5 million to 6.9 million. The scale if not the size, is
similar to many Chinese cities—between 1980 and 2010, the population of Beijing
expanded from 9 million to 21 million people, while the population of Shanghai
grew from 11 million to 20 million. Shenzhen, which grew from a town of 300,000
people to a city of over 10 million people, is in a league of its own.”
Gardner
credits the Chinese city of Wenzhou with the beginning of the great migration.
Before the revolution Wenzhou was a trading center of the region with contacts
from around the world. Then, with the rise of Mao, the city was neglected and
suffered relative poverty. The city is on the Chinese southern coast, but was
isolated from the rest of the nation and its language is difficult to
translate.
Because
of its isolation and the fact that the soil in the area is difficult to farm,
many farmers from the Wenzhou area migrated to the city. Wenzhou eventually
became a center for spare parts for cars and motorcycles, as well as for
buttons and zippers. The economy grew at an amazing rate of 19% per year.
Gardner
also gave the story of the other side to this development in the following
quotation:
“The
city is badly polluted, with trash clogging the streams that lead to the Ou
River. Wenzhou is also one of the only cities in China that turns a blind eye
to urban slums. Makeshift housing made out of concrete blocks and corrugated
iron is thrown up in the middle of abandoned lots, occasionally only a few
blocks from downtown.” However, the wages for migrant workers is the highest in
China.
The
Cultural Revolution took place between the years 1966—1976. During that time 17
million youth were sent to the countryside. After that time most of those youth
returned to the cities and looked for work. This was the initial impetus for
allowing private enterprises to exist in China. While those enterprises were
only supposed to have seven employees, this law was routinely broken.
Ultimately
the larger influx into the cities came from farmers from the countryside. These
former farmers also set up their private businesses and started the mass
migration.
In the
year 2003 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao abolished the law that allowed the police
to detain and repatriate workers who didn’t have the proper papers. Migration
throughout China became a right.
Before
this change in the Hukou law, Gardner described the treatment of migrants as
“often abysmal, with prolonged detention without trial, extortion of the
detained or their families, as well as beatings and deprivations of those held
in custody.”
However
today foreign corporations own over forty percent of the Chinese economy. One
of those corporations is the electronics giant Foxconn that is based in Taiwan.
Foxconn
has several factories in Shenzhen in southern China. Hundreds of thousands of
workers live in dormitories where guards are stationed twenty-four hours every
day. Foxconn requires employees to have the proper identification at all times.
Family members are not allowed to enter the city where the workers live. So,
Foxconn treats Chinese workers as immigrants in their own country.
Zhengzhou
is the provincial capital of Henan province. Henan is an inland region located
far away from the coastal cities. Between the year 2011 and 2013 about 300,000
people moved to the Dazhai Village on the outskirts of Zhenghou. If you
purchased an IPhone after 2012 it was probably made in this Dazhai village.
Foxconn
or Hon Hai owns the factory that produces these IPhones. Hundreds of thousands
of workers toil in the Foxconn factories at Dazhai and there is a 20 percent
turnover rate. This means that Foxconn needs to hire 700 workers every day.
There
are three requirements for workers. They must be 18 years of age. They are not
allowed to have tattoos. They were not fired by the company. Workers who meet
these requirements are eligible to work making IPhones. One of the reasons why
there is so much turnover at the company is because the wages at Foxconn are
lower than most wages in the rest of China. One of the reasons why workers are
attracted to this area is that it is closer to the countryside where many
workers live.
John
Smith wrote about the Foxconn electronic factories of Shenzhen in his book: Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century –The globalization of production, super-exploitation, and the crisis ofcapitalism. He reported that Foxconn initially centered their production in
Shenzhen, located in the southeast near Hong Kong. In the following passage
Smith reported on the relationship between Foxconn (Hon Hai) and the Apple
Corporation.
Workers
who have jobs with Hon Hai do all the work necessary to produce Apple products
like the iPhone. In 2013 Hon Hai had
sales of $132.1 billion and profits of $10.7 billion. Hon Hai had a workforce at that time of
1,232,000 employees. Employees for the
Apple Corporation do none of the work in the manufacturing of it’s products. Yet, in the year 2013 Apple had $41.7 billion
in profits on $164.7 billion in sales with a workforce of 72,800 employees.
Smith
also reported that the “2013 production cost of 16GB IPhone 5C was $156, rising
to $213 for a 16GB IPhone 5S, while the retail price for each unlocked hardset
is $549 and $649 respectively, yielding profit margins of 61 percent and 67
percent.” “The value of the share price of Hon Hai is $32.1 billion while the
share price of Apple is valued at $416.6 billion.” This has made Apple one of
the most profitable corporations in the world.
Chinese
workers protested against these kinds of conditions with about 2,700 strikes in
the year 2015. The number of strikes in China has been increasing since 2011.
In the past three years the number of strikes have peaked at around 2,700 per
year. One of the primary issues for labor is the refusal by employers to pay
about one percent of the workers in the 260 million migrant labor force.
There
has been a film made of the Chinese labor movement titled, We The Workers. The Chinese government responded by arresting
several of those who worked to make this film. This attitude of the Chinese
government is typical of their opposition to the strike wave in that country.
Conclusion
Bradley
M. Gardner uses the last chapter in his book to conclude that migration as well
as immigration is good for capitalist economies around the world. This is a
stark polemic against President Donald Trump who has made the deportation of
immigrants his central priority. We can also say that the number of
deportations in the United States has been increasing with both democratic and
republican presidents.
Gardner
ignores the issue of factory workers in the United States who have seen jobs
eliminated due to huge investments in nations like China. While Gardner is
aware that extreme crisis can unfold in the capitalist system, he is unwilling
to even consider the idea that a workers government is a rational alternative.
Gardner’s
idea of communism is the Chinese government that has accommodated itself to
massive capitalist investment. He also correctly argues that the government run
enterprises in China are not as efficient as the privately owned corporations.
Here Garner is in agreement with Fidel Castro who made a similar argument
because of entirely different reasons.
Because
of the embargo against Cuba by the United States, that nation needed to
establish trading relations with the former Soviet Union. Cuba discovered that
many of the commodities Cuba purchased from the Soviet Union were sub-standard
and at times useless. For this reason, Fidel Castro concluded that in a sense,
capitalist methods of production were more efficient from those methods in a
bureaucratic state like the Soviet Union.
However,
Cuba has a different kind of leadership from the bureaucracies in Russia and
China. Because of this, Cuba has lower infant mortality and a longer life
expectancy than the United States. This is in a nation that is 100% Latino and
40% Afro-Cuban. This example shows that there is a clear alternative to the
Chinese example.
On
the other hand, in John Smith’s book on Imperialism,
he argues that there were two reasons why there hasn’t been an economic
collapse already. One has been due to a tremendous amount of debt from
financial speculation. Because corporations are continually obsessed with
selling more products and cutting costs, there is a tendency for the economy to
produce more goods and services that people can purchase.
This
creates an atmosphere where there are more goods on the market than people are
buying. If there are fewer sales, profits decline and corporations have no
reason to invest. Therefore the crisis of capitalism is about having more
commodities on the market than people will buy. This fact explains why
capitalists invest about $200 billion in advertising every year.
Because
there is a continual decline in the percent of profit on investments,
capitalists are continually driven to cut costs. This explains why they have
invested so much money in China and other nations where wages are abysmally
low.
Most
economists blamed the 2008 economic crisis on the housing market. Housing was
overvalued and many borrowers were unable to pay on their loans. This crisis
resulted from the fact that the return on investments in manufacturing had
deteriorated. The crisis of 2008 was only temporarily postponed by a massive
government bailout known as quantitative
easing.
Understanding
all of this, we can conclude that while I’m opposed to all deportations,
increased immigration will not save the capitalist economy. People are willing
to work and there are sufficient materials to make a profound improvement in
the standard of living. Yet a capitalist crisis is inevitable because capitalists
will simply refuse to invest because they will see that those investments will
not yield sufficient profits.
Another road for China
Today
many corporations are not interested in investing in Cuba. While corporations
routinely invest in nations that have horrendous wages and working conditions,
they don’t typically like to invest in Cuba.
This
is because Cuba has made it their top priority to provide for the needs of
literally everyone on the island. Capitalists don’t like the fact that all Cubans have access to a lifetime of
health care and education. Capitalists would prefer to have the resources used
for these services in their profits.
Had
China followed a similar road as Cuba, I would argue that most capitalists
would not have invested in that nation. It is possible that the tremendous
growth of the Chinese economy would not have been so dramatic.
However,
had the Chinese government made a priority of the needs of every Chinese
citizen, and aligned with workers and farmers around the world, I believe the
standard of living in China would be better than it is today.
If
there was a Chinese government that supported the interests of all Chinese, the
creativity of the people of that nation would flower. The Chinese would have
found ways of resolving problems using the resources of that country.
China
would have become a beacon for workers and farmers from around the world. We
can question if the political economic system of capitalism would have been
able to survive when one-sixth of the human race is outside of its orbit.
Today
Chinese workers have the power to take control of the government in their
country. We might keep in mind that shortly before the Russian Revolution there
was also a massive migration from the countryside to the cities where former
peasants toiled in factories.
However,
today Chinese workers have already experienced repression from a government
that claims to be communist. They have seen how there are ghost towns in China built to house thousands of people. Yet these
towns are empty because workers who have produced all the wealth of China
aren’t able to afford to live there. Added to this, the Chinese government
announced that it may eliminate 1.8 million jobs from the state run
enterprises. Yes, there is reason for the Chinese people to want a profound
change.
I
think we need to keep these ideas in mind when we think about the future of
China today. Workers throughout the world will welcome strikes by Chinese
workers. These workers are our brothers and sisters who are engaged in the
international struggle to make this a world where human needs are more
important than profits.
