China’s booming economy is bound to go bust

Despite a rate of growth that is the envy of the world, China’s economy is, in fact, a ticking time bomb. Because the 1.3 billion people providing cheap labour to fuel its boom represent mushrooming fuel demands that portend its bust.

Of course, Chinese leaders are acutely aware of this pending doom. And, notwithstanding the lip service they now pay to human rights, their State Family Commission is still executing China’s inhumane “one child per family” rule in a futile effort to avert this symbiotic (population triggering economic) explosion. But before it became an economic superpower in the 1990s, China’s infanticidal family planning laws made it a pariah in the international community. Unfortunately, many erstwhile critics of these laws (U.S. and European countries) have chosen to partner with China in the exploitation of Chinese labourers instead of challenging China to respect their human rights.

In fact, the only noteworthy human rights development in recent years has been China’s deployment of a sophisticated PR machine that manufactures its national image the way China manufactures new toys for American consumption. For example, I am reliably informed by Chinese friends that their evolved communist government shrewdly directs foreigners to big cities (like Shanghai and Beijing) that emulate western cities (like New York and Paris) in every way – including the personal freedoms western city dwellers enjoy. But where city life is relatively uniform throughout America and France, the affectations of modernity and freedom in China’s big cities are designed to divert attention from the feudal, barren and collectivized rural areas where most of its billion plus people still reside.

And, in these tourist-free zones, blackouts do not occur because utility workers accidentally slice power lines; instead, blackouts are a way of life because there are no power lines supplying electricity to these areas at all.

In these tourist-free zones, unemployment has become chronic not because another manufacturing plant has been forced out of business; instead, unemployment prevails because China’s great leap forward into the technological age of mass production of food (and almost everything else) has rendered collectivized peasant farming redundant.

In these tourist-free zones, the Confucian order of family life is breaking down not because women are abandoning “domestic bliss” for professional careers; instead, things are falling apart because men are migrating to the big showcase cities to find jobs to support their families.

And, herein lies China’s (and ultimately the world’s) growth dilemma:

Because the more village peasants are lured by the bright lights and economic promises of city life, the greater China’s energy demands become. And, the greater China’s energy demands become, the more of the world’s zero-sum supply of energy China will consume. And, the more energy China consumes, the more sustained high gas and heating oil prices shall remain. (Recall that less than 5 years ago, OPEC stated it sees the “ideal price for crude between $ 22-28”. But the “ideal” price now seems to be twice that amount….)

Meanwhile, China’s big cities continue their inexorable population growth and energy consumption that will inevitably cause its booming economy to go bust. And, despite the ruthless enforcement of its one child per family policy (including forced sterilizations and late-term abortions), Chinese leaders seem powerless to defuse this ticking (and migrating) time bomb.

Note: Ironically, the Communist Party has encountered resistance to its one child per family campaign from the very city dwellers it promotes as beneficiaries of China’s growing economic power. Because these relatively cosmopolitan Chinese regard the Party’s PR posters, which link happiness, prosperity and patriotism to having just one child (invariably a boy), as provincial and a tacit sanctioning of the killing of female infants.

Alas, the centre cannot hold….

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