PART TWO 2011
THE OTHER FACE
The fact that Pat Kennedy was still in love with Middle Kingdom was more to do with Lili than the exploits of modern China. He was in the honeymoon period that all those who discover a new country experience. Whatever Pat’s feelings for Lili he was not naive, he had glanced behind the scenes and had discovered China’s other face. A face that was not so very different to that of the UK’s a century or so earlier, where children worked ten hours a day, where miners and steelworkers slaved, where small holders struggled to make ends meet, and where after the introduction of mass production millions laboured in wretched factory conditions for wages that barely allowed them to exist.
In twenty first century China there were blighted industrial regions that resembled certain parts of contemporary Britain, where many of Her Majesty’s citizens lived in no-hope misery, where generational unemployment was commonplace and contrary to popular belief not all of them watched footy on the latest HD TV with a can of beer at the ready.
Kennedy’s friend, John Francis, could have explained the effects of rapid, poorly planned, industrialisation and its negative effects. What was good for capitalists out for a quick buck was not the same for those who would live in the rust belts that were left when industry moved on.
China’s phenomenally rapid economic leap forward, which had promised an Asian century, was now beginning to show the first signs of the ills industrialisation had brought to Manchester, Sheffield, the Ruhr, Pittsburgh, Detroit and more recently the industrial heart of post-Soviet Russia. Everything moved faster, including the decline of China’s heavy and state owned industries.
After decades of spectacular growth China was slowing down and would have to adapt to the conditions of a more mature economy. The dash for wealth and prosperity had run its course. Countless millions of peasants had been left behind, stuck in the trap of rural poverty. Those who had made the quantum leap to modernity were discovering that growth fuelled by massive credit was unsustainable. They, like others elsewhere in the world, would learn that ever rising living standards were a chimera.
Large parts of China’s industrial landscape were beginning to look bleak, an ecological nightmare. A crippling legacy of disease provoked by industrial pollution and unsustainable debt, the cost of which would fall on the shoulders of future generations. Who would pay for the clean up? Who would care for those whose health was destroyed? Who would repay the debts?
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