https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/xi-jinping-china-distracts-from-massive-debt-rural-poverty/
Xi insists that the world look at him and the PRC on his terms: as a force to be reckoned with, a growing economic power not to be ignored. This is perhaps Xi’s greatest achievement. Credible economic and foreign-policy analysts have published tracts on “the Chinese Century.” According to this analysis, the Chinese economy either already has taken over as the world’s largest (according to the International Monetary Fund) or will do so soon.
And yet . . . China remains a country riven by fault lines that make all of this impossible. In fact, President Xi’s greatest achievement is his mastery not over reality but over illusion. To create the illusion, Xi forces us to observe the foreground distractions — conspicuous urban wealth, global companies dominating their sectors, the largest banks in the world, military expansion, diplomatic energy.
That’s the China Xi wants us to see. By focusing on it, the world misses the reality of the China that is in the background: runaway public and private debt fueled by both the formal and the shadow banking sectors; aging parents and grandparents who lack support because their younger family members and relatives are too few, and because the working-age, younger population is proportionately too small to fund a strong safety net; rural poverty that rivals the worst found anywhere else, at a scale found nowhere else; and a “left-behind generation,” tens of millions of children whose parents have left to seek hope in the cities.
Xi insists that the world look at him and the PRC on his terms: as a force to be reckoned with, a growing economic power not to be ignored. This is perhaps Xi’s greatest achievement. Credible economic and foreign-policy analysts have published tracts on “the Chinese Century.” According to this analysis, the Chinese economy either already has taken over as the world’s largest (according to the International Monetary Fund) or will do so soon.
And yet . . . China remains a country riven by fault lines that make all of this impossible. In fact, President Xi’s greatest achievement is his mastery not over reality but over illusion. To create the illusion, Xi forces us to observe the foreground distractions — conspicuous urban wealth, global companies dominating their sectors, the largest banks in the world, military expansion, diplomatic energy.
That’s the China Xi wants us to see. By focusing on it, the world misses the reality of the China that is in the background: runaway public and private debt fueled by both the formal and the shadow banking sectors; aging parents and grandparents who lack support because their younger family members and relatives are too few, and because the working-age, younger population is proportionately too small to fund a strong safety net; rural poverty that rivals the worst found anywhere else, at a scale found nowhere else; and a “left-behind generation,” tens of millions of children whose parents have left to seek hope in the cities.