The Capitalist Ground Shaken
By The Earthquake In China
By Li Onesto
27 May, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2:28 pm. A huge earthquake, registering 8.0 on the Richter
scale, struck
Sichuan Province in southwest China. The violent shaking lasted more than
a minute, leaving
towns and small cities flattened. On Sunday, May 25, a powerful aftershock
struck, causing
thousands more buildings to collapse.
The death toll now stands at over 62,000 people. 160,000 have been
injured. Five million left
homeless. More than 200,000 homes completely collapsed and four million
were damaged.
The quake hit in the middle of the day when schools were in
session—children were napping,
sitting at their desks, and playing in schoolyards. Some re****ts say 30-40
percent of the dead
were schoolchildren. In the town of Mianzhu alone, seven schools,
including two nursery
schools, collapsed—burying more than 1,700 students.
*****
What happens when such a natural disaster occurs is profoundly affected by
how a society is
organized. And many things about the nature of China have been revealed by
this catastrophe.
Most people around the world watching this heartbreaking tragedy think
China is a socialist
country, run by a communist government. But in fact, since the reactionary
coup led by Deng
Xiaoping after Mao Tsetung’s death in 1976, China has been a capitalist
country, dependent on
and subordinate to global imperialism. And some stark things about the
exploitative and
oppressive nature of capitalist China have been revealed in the aftermath
of this devastating
earthquake.
“Tofu” Schools Became Death Traps
Close to 7,000 schools, a dispro****tionately high number of buildings,
were destroyed. In some
towns, an entire generation has virtually been wiped out.
Town after town, grief has turned to anger as parents accuse the
government of shoddy
construction to save money. Pu Changxue, whose son died, crushed in a
classroom, said: “This
was a tofu dregs project and the government should assume responsibility.
We all know that
earthquakes are natural disasters. But what happened to our children also
has human causes, and
they’re even more frightening.”
In Juyuan, a middle school collapsed. As many as 900 children were buried
in the rubble, while
nearby buildings remained standing. One resident said: “Look at the
building materials they
used. The cement wasn’t mixed with water in the right pro****tion. There
are not enough steel
beams. The sand isn’t clean.”
There are supposed to be seismic regulations and requirements for
different types of buildings.
But lack of money for education has meant old buildings have not been
replaced. And many times,
even when new schools are built, shoddy material is used and building
codes are ignored in
order to save money.
The bodies of kids pulled from the rubble have revealed an ugly truth
about class society in
China: That schools for kids from the bottom layers of society are very
different than schools
for students from well-off families. Children from the upper strata get a
better education.
They also get safer schools. And when the earthquake hit, this became a
question of life or death.
According to a New York Times article, in Dujiangyan, the Xinjian Primary
School had been
poorly built and “never got its share of government funds for
reconstruction because of its low
ranking in the local education bureaucracy and the low social status of
its students.” The
parents who sent their children to Xinjian are poor. Many had lost their
jobs when a local
cement plant shut down—some collect small welfare payments and hold down
odd jobs to sup****t
their families, others had left their children behind to look for work
somewhere else. Hundreds
of children died at Xinjian when the earthquake hit. Meanwhile, another
local primary school,
Beijie, suffered hardly any damage and students survived. Beijie was set
up for the elite with
the best facilities and finest teachers. (NY Times, “Chinese Are Left to
Ask Why Schools
Crumbled,” May 25, 2008)
Western media, as well as news re****ts in China, have suggested that
developers tried to
maximize profits by using inferior materials, cutting back on necessary
work and paying off
corrupt officials. The Chinese government has announced there will be
investigations into
whether sloppy work linked to corruption is to blame. And there will, no
doubt, now be official
accusations of bribery, scapegoats, and a campaign to “clean up
corruption.”
But the fundamental problem here is NOT corruption, inept administrators,
or bribery in the
building of schools. Yes, that is truly horrible and resulted in the
deaths of thousands of
children. But targeting this doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The
real problem here is
the dynamics of capitalism—how the drive for profit trumps everything
else, how economic growth
is driven by intensifying exploitation, short-term gain, and cost
minimization. And how these
capitalist economic relations get reflected in and played out in the
social and political
relations in society and the thinking of people. Corruption is very real,
but it is an
outgrowth of capitalist development.
Some people say the problem is that there is not enough transparency in
China. They pose the
problem as: China being open or shut; listening or not; censoring the
Internet or leaving it
alone, etc., etc. But all this begs the fundamental question: What kind of
society is China?
What is its relation****p to global capitalism? What does it mean that
China has become a vast
sweatshop for the world; that the gap between rich and poor in China is
growing; that peasants
in the countryside are desperate and impoverished—and that the lives of
millions who were
already desperately poor because China is subordinate to imperialism have
been suddenly thrown
into an even greater hell by this earthquake?
Widening Inequality Gap
Sichuan is one of China’s poorest areas and does not have a lot of
manufacturing. But this
province is an im****tant grain and ****k producer and has China’s largest
reserves of natural gas.
Over the last decade there has been a burst of construction in rural,
inland areas like
Sichuan. But the huge inequality gap between urban and rural areas
remains. And this gap has
been further imprinted in the whole way that these smaller towns and
cities are being developed.
Many in the areas most affected by the earthquake are poor peasants. In
Wenchuan, at the
epicenter of the quake, the average annual income was around 1,600 yuan in
2002 (latest
available statistics), which is less than a fifth of the average income in
the province’s
capital city of Chengdu. The death, damage and suffering from the
earthquake reflect this
income gap. Living in more impoverished conditions to begin with resulted
in greater
devastation and now more ongoing hard****p. And inequality between the city
and countryside also
impacts things. For example, people in rural areas have access to much
less health care than
those who live in the cities. This means they are less healthy to begin
with and now have less
access to desperately needed medical attention.
When China was truly a socialist country, a conscious goal of the
government and society was to
continually narrow (and eventually get rid of) inequalities in
society—between different
cl*****, between men and women, between different nationalities, and
between the cities and
countryside. But now, through the workings of capitalism, such differences
are being widened.
Time magazine has written about how “economic reforms” have chipped away
at the medical
treatment available when China was socialist—health care that was often
rudimentary but widely
available to all citizens: “China’s famed ‘barefoot doctors,’ usually
middle school graduates
trained in first aid, hiked through hamlets offering prenatal examinations
and setting broken
limbs. The service, essentially free, helped to almost eradicate ***ually
transmitted diseases
in China and nearly doubled the country’s life expectancy from 35 to 65
between 1949 to the
mid-1970s. But in the early 1980s, the mainland began ****fting from
communism to capitalism,
and peasants had to dig into their own tattered pockets to pay for health
care. At the same
time, cash-strapped local governments cut subsidies to rural hospitals and
clinics, essentially
privatizing them... City dwellers remain better-off, mostly because six in
10 of them have some
form of health insurance. Only 10% of rural residents do, and most of them
are government
employees or live in wealthy coastal areas, where many work in factories.”
(China’s Failing
Health System, Time, May 12, 2003)
This kind of deepening economic and social inequality now exists in many
different aspects of
Chinese society—which can mean the difference between life and death when
an earthquake hits.
Get-Rich-Quick Development
Over the last several decades China has become more integrated into and
subordinate to the
world capitalist system. Foreign investments have poured into China.
Fortune 500 companies with
investments in Sichuan include Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, United
Technologies,
McDonalds, Lufthansa, Sony, Intel, Cisco Systems, and Archer Daniels
Midland.
There has been all kinds of fast-paced “get rich quick” economic
development. This has mainly
been concentrated in the country’s eastern coastal areas where there are
concentrated pools of
cheap labor and access to ****pping. But in recent years, this kind of
rapid economic growth has
branched out into interior areas, including into the cities and towns hit
by the May 12 earthquake.
In many cases, such expansion has meant people being forcibly relocated.
This push for rapid
growth forces builders to move fast. And this has led companies and the
government to trample
on the rights of residents and ignoring building safety requirements.
Policemen have been sent
in to enforce evictions. And there have been several re****ts of people
protesting demolitions
and evictions by setting themselves on fire and committing suicide.
Five years ago, these massive renovations were mainly happening in large
cities. Now they are
going on in more medium and smaller cities—like Sichuan’s capital of
Chengdu, about 145 miles
from the epicenter of the earthquake. City officials there had announced
plans to spend 10
billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) to build a new town in its northern suburbs.
Thousands of smaller cities are sprouting up on formerly uninhabited
pastureland. This rapid
urbanization has transformed Sichuan into one of China’s biggest provinces
with a population of
82 million. It is this kind of demolition and quick construction that has
created conditions
for rampant corruption, leading to the kind of slipshod building that
people are now pointing
to in the wake of the earthquake. It is these rural areas and smaller
towns that suffered the
greatest destruction from the earthquake.
This kind of economic development—driven by short-term gains, rapid
growth, and cost
minimization—has also factored into the building of dams in China. And
now, in the wake of the
earthquake, there is an extremely dangerous situation where shoddily-built
dams are damaged,
putting millions in harm’s way of potential flood waters—especially given
continuing aftershocks.
There have been re****ts that hundreds of dams have been damaged by the
earthquake. For example,
the Zipingpu Dam, completed in 2006, was built over the objections of
seismologists who were
concerned about its proximity to major geological faults. After the
earthquake, soldiers rushed
to the dam after re****ts that it was developing cracks.
Crocodile Tears Covering Up a Criminal System
Some news commentators have said this earthquake is a “godsend” for the
Chinese
government—pointing to the fact that world political opinion has not been
going well for China.
Its brutal repression in Tibet captured headlines for weeks, just as China
was getting ready
for its mega-PR campaign around the Olympics. There were numerous protests
as the Olympic torch
made its way around the world.
Now the earthquake has given China an op****tunity to turn public opinion
more favorable to
China’s reactionary regime. Top government officials quickly flew to the
devastated areas,
crying crocodile tears and putting on a show of concern for TV
cameras—knowing this would be
beamed not only throughout China but around the world. The Chinese
government is highly aware
that, especially in the wake of the cyclone in Myanmar, its handling of
this disaster is being
closely watched, throughout the country and internationally. The storyline
has been how
competent, compassionate, and in control the rescue and relief efforts
have been.
The rulers of China face a lot of necessity here—both domestically and
internationally. They
need to keep social control in the face of growing disparity and
discontent. And they face a
complex and changing economic and political polarization in the world as
they try to press
forward with their international ambitions. From the very beginning, the
Chinese government has
seen the Olympics as a way to create more favorable political conditions,
both domestically and
internationally.
The crocodile tears being shed by government officials after the
earthquake only serve to cover
up the real truth: The Chinese economy is deeply integrated into and
subordinated to the global
capitalist system. The development of capitalism in China has been and
continues to be a living
nightmare for hundreds of millions of people. And what China really needs
is another revolution
aimed at overthrowing the new capitalist ruling class, re-achieving
national independence, and
creating a genuine and truly liberating socialist society.
Li Onesto is a writer for Revolution (revcom.us) and author of the book,
Dispatches from the
People's War in Nepal, (Pluto Press and Insight Press, 2004)
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