China's "inescapable pressures" swell to 13 as investigation into coronavirus origins creates "dark cloud" -- China Boss update 3.12.21
Update
China's “inescapable pressures”
Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed in which he argued “China’s looming population slide could make it an even more dangerous global threat.” Olsen described China’s demographic crisis as something that did not necessarily have to determine “destiny” but which “create[s] inescapable pressures” to which China’s party-state must react.
According to Olsen:
The decline, once it starts to take hold, will dramatically reduce the Communist government’s ability to project global power. The working-age population — people between 18 and 65 — is already shrinking.
This decline will become more dramatic in the next 10 to 15 years, sharply reducing China’s economy. A rise in the number of older people reliant on state or family support will also force a reallocation of resources toward consumption rather than investment, the military or foreign influence-buying.
That could curtail China’s ability to project power globally 20 to 30 years from now.
Olsen warily concluded there were “only two ways” the Chinese government could get “out of this trap”:
One is to significantly increase the number of children — something the government is scrambling to achieve. The other is ominous: secure resources and power abroad now to support the Chinese population later.
Emphasis added.
China’s emerging demographic crisis is just one of, at least, a dozen, stubborn problems the nation faces as it tries to ensure future economic growth and political stability. These are the thorniest of matters that also affect the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to lord over more than a billion people, as well as global security.
China’s 12 persistent pressures
Here’s a list of 12 looming threats, including demographic decline, that Chinese leaders cannot seem to resolve despite years, in some cases decades, of policies and reforms:
1. Influx of 300 million internal migrants into China’s brimming cities who are denied access to basic services and are resented by urban dwellers
2. Vehicle congestion in ten of China’s largest and most important commercial cities that causes deadly-levels of air pollution and inefficiencies in production
3. Fostering of innovation while blocking outside information that contradicts official narratives
4. A 3.3:1 ratio of urban to rural incomes and growing income inequality, even in the cities, that chokes domestic consumption
5. Fiscal decentralization policies that incentivize local governments to generate additional revenue by burdening low income households with heavy taxes and administrative fees
6. Wrongful land appropriations by local governments that angers rural residents who sometime violently demonstrate en masse
7. Fraught relationship with nearly one-tenth of China’s population who are divided among fifty-five distinct ethnic groups, living mainly in China’s border regions
8. Providing food security for over a billion people on shrinking arable land
9. Caring for China’s aging population, while avoiding the “middle income trap” - where China’s labor gets old before the nation can get rich
10. Generating sufficient energy to continue development without irreversibly damaging the environment with greenhouse gases
11. Containing growing tensions in special administrative regions, like Hong Kong and Macao, while confronting hostile opposition in Taiwan to China’s One China without military conflict that could result in a major world war
12. Managing territorial disputes with Japan, South and North Korea, Pakistan, India, Vietnam and Russia without military conflict
To be fair, it would be hard to imagine political leaders anywhere who possess the skill, foresight, and resolve to successfully manage all of the problems on the Chinesegovernment's formidable to-do list.
Unfortunately, however, there’s another peril taking shape that Chinese leaders will most certainly have to contend with - international outrage over China’s role in the current pandemic, as well its lack of transparency and cooperation in the hunt for coronavirus origins.
Make that 13: The hunt for coronavirus origins - a “dark cloud” on China
This week, Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who also sits on its editorial board, wrote an important opinion piece, “Wuhan Lab Theory a Dark Cloud on China,” in which he argued:
The lab theory is the big fork in the road. We might have to reset our risk perceptions dramatically—worry less about humans messing around in animal habitats, worry more about scientists messing around in labs.
On that basis alone, the lab theory is the most important informational chokepoint as we move ahead.
But there’s another reason. If the lab theory remains unresolved, especially if China’s refusal to cooperate makes it unresolvable, it will hang over global politics for decades to come even without conspiracy theorists and demagogues taking a hand.
Emphasis added.
As a attorney, I can’t help but agree.
In rule of law societies, disputes are as much about managing grievances - so they don’t spillover into mass anger or vigilantism - as they are about seeking justice. That’s how most public order in democracies is achieved. Ideally, lawyers and judges attempt to relieve the victim’s distress by acknowledging that he or she was wronged - and, then, by redressing injuries in a way that avoids overly harsh punishment of the offender and further dissatisfaction and resentment down the road.
For the time being, the Chinese leadership has chosen not to acknowledge its role as the offender in the pandemic, whether due to intentional disregard for human life, recklessness or neglect, and that will not sit well with the families of those who have perished from Covid-19 or with those who have lost jobs and homes due to economies shutting down.
Currently, the world is consumed with getting to recovery, with all hopes on establishing herd immunity through vaccination. But international grievances won’t, simply, go away. I worry that the Chinese government is so unaccustomed to being held accountable that it has, both, institutional and psychological impediments to accepting any sort of responsibility that would enable it to acknowledge wrongs in an appropriate and meaningful way.
Lack of redress will make it very hard for the world to heal and move beyond the trauma that the pandemic has caused. But denial of what has occurred would be most especially tough on China - not to mention President Xi, an already an insecure and paranoid leader fixed on absolute power and control, whose head is likely to remain twisted over his shoulder on indefinite guard against reprisals from across the globe.
How much pressure can a party-state take before it begins to choke?