On 2/6/07, Anthony D'Costa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think the absorptive capacities of these economies, including China, must be a factor for the continued lending. China is certainly not growing slowly because it is lending money to the US. It just that it can't utilize that amount of capital in its domestic economy. It's a classic structural problem IMHO.
As far as overall growth rates are concerned, China can't have anything to complain about. But the twin commitment to export-led growth and accumulation of dollar reserves shapes the kind of social and economic transformation that the country undergoes. Of course, it is possible that a majority of China's peasants and workers think that it's a fair trade-off -- more inequalities for faster growth -- and in fact that is probably the case today (though they may not always think so in the future). But it would have been better if China's workers and peasants had had a chance to collectively debate whether they really wanted to make that trade-off before the country got itself locked into an increasingly risky, interdependent relation with the US and Japan. Instead of a "Cultural Revolution," China needed a clear economic debate in the sixties (to be sure, economic alternatives were at the heart of the Cultural Revolution, but the alternatives were veiled by cultural slogans). -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
