Assuming for the moment that huge financial wealth and GDP growth is
always good for the country and its people, this comes down to two
questions:
1) Is the new wealth in China too heavily concentrated?
2) Is the new prosperity permanent and sustainable or is this a bubble?
--raghu.
If you read Paul and Marty's rejoinder to their critics in Critical Asian
Studies, they make an important point about the unit of analysis. It should
not be the nation-state but the world economy. Under capitalism, there are
winners and losers. China's gains have come at other nation's expenses. All
of this is documented in great deal in their book, which I obviously think
is spot-on as the Brits put it. But the question of whether it is
"socialist" or not is not academic. Capitalism breeds war. In WWI, all the
prosperous nations of Europe slaughtered millions of workers to defend
their own investments. We need a system based on social need, not private
profit, in order to save the planet from annihilation. GDP growth is
entirely secondary compared to this criterion.
