What If Big Western Banks And Businesses Want China To Remain A Dictatorship For As Long As Possible?

Anton Goryunov writes from Beijing: Here’s a crazy thought: could it be that Western banks and big business want China to stay a dictatorship for as long as possible? Why? Because it would suit them perfectly and the last thing they would actually want is for China to start introducing serious political and economic reforms, wiping out the astronomical returns on foreign investments that a properly functioning economy never delivers.

In the past decade or so Western media has been very coy about China’s dictatorial ways. What’s even more surprising is that some academics and hacks and even government officials in the West have been saying that China is not a really a communist tyranny but more of a free market economy going through a process of change. The idea is to implant in people’s brains that communists in China are not really communists per se and that there’s no point in putting pressure on them to change their one party system and give political freedoms to their people.

Sure, occasionally there comes an article or two in the Western media about China’s unimpressive human rights record, its refusal to introduce political plurality and give people at least some freedom of choice. But these drown in the sea of excited reports about the ‘Chinese economic miracle’ and its emergence as the new superpower. And somehow the vile communist nature of the Chinese ruling regime that stands accused of murdering about 80 million of its people gets lost. Just what the money men and big companies want.

Make no mistake: China is one big labour camp and even though it has introduced a free market of sorts, it’s a distorted free market that is run by the Communist Party apparatchiks who decide who makes money and who doesn’t. All those colossal vanity projects that the West is so impressed by are financed by the money that has been taken away from hundreds of millions of Chinese through denying them any form of welfare. This is classical communism and if the bankers and big businessmen in the West think they can cover up their disgraceful propping of this communist monster with their investments and vast orders for cheap goods, they can think again. These vultures would love to see the current status quo in China stay on for as long as possible, making all that lovely money on the suffering of about a billion people. It was the same with the Nazis in Germany, until they turned against the very people who supported them.

Make no mistake: all communist empires fall at some point. And it is really weird to hear all sorts of ‘experts’ on China telling us that the 21st century would be ‘China’s century’ and that it is quickly turning into an economic superpower while beefing up its military arsenals. Some keen fans of China are even predicting that Mandarin would become the official language in many parts of the world by 2050.

In other words, the feeling among academics and analysts and commentators is that China currently is a sleeping giant that is about to wake up and start kicking butt and dictating its terms to the rest of the world. And the funniest thing of all is that the Chinese communist leaders themselves have actually fallen for that scenario, believing that world domination would be their thing in a couple of decades or so.

Well, they are wrong, the academics, the experts and the Chinese communist leaders. China has about as much chance of becoming a superpower as Zimbabwe, because the so-called Chinese economic miracle exists mostly on paper, lovingly prepared by the statisticians on the ground who report to local communist bosses and add a zero or two here and there, to keep their jobs safe. Not to mention that by civilised standards the Chinese economy is closer to feudalism than to capitalism.

A communist state is incapable of building a properly functioning economy because it interferes into every aspect of day to day business and operates on the assumption that giving orders is the same as providing incentives for producers. That is why China’s economic stats are about as reliable as Fidel Castro’s promises to start respecting his people’s civil rights and liberties. Chinese official stats are for mugs, if you want it straight, and anyone who treats them seriously needs his head examined.

The only reason why China has been growing rapidly in the past several decades was because the starting point was set very low – China’s economy was minuscule in the 1970s and because Western banks and all sorts of dodgy investors pumped enormous amounts of money into it, getting huge returns on the production of consumer goods by slave labour. The money men were only thinking of their profits.

China’s economy is starting to slow down, compliments of the financial crisis brought on by the greedy banks. The pressure within the country is mounting and the communists are feeling the heat, with infighting at the top getting out of control. The best scenario for everyone would be for China to start a process of real reform and stop playing this farce with the supposedly booming economy that benefits the majority.

But the chances of that happening are slim. Not least because big international banks would not want this to happen.

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