KV - China's Economic System

The Alleviation of Poverty 

 Based on an article by Danny Haiphong and the videos of Gweilo 60. 

Micheal Hudson often talks about how public industries should supply low cost services to the public and private industries to increase a country's standard of living, and to help make the private sector more competitive in the world. But in the West the the captains of industry felt they could making even bigger profits from both the private sector and the public sector together, and so they got governments to privatise the public utilities. But China has done the opposite, subsidising the public utilities to bring costs down for the consumer and the private sector. 

The Internet is incredibly cheap in China because it is subsidised by the government, and there are no roaming charges, so if you are high up on a remote mountain the internet costs are exactly the same as it does in a city, which makes it cheaper for people in remote areas to participate in the economy, and to become more educated, or to run their own business. 

Roads and services are taken to the remote, very poor villages high up in the mountains, and teams of advisors are sent in to show the villagers how to grow more nutritious food, and even how to grow a surplus which they can take to the market at the nearest towns. This increases China's GDP. 

New schools are being built in the local towns, and the new roads can help the village children to get to them. Then, when they have the qualifications and are at the right age, they can find work in the town's factories and businesses and then send money back home. And so the standard of living improves in the villages, and young, newly educated bright people may even start their own internet companies, maybe selling exotic farm produce they have produced, or buying and selling on Alibaba, or just supplying internet services, or working for a major company from home. The government has made this all possible by supplying the infrastructure, the services, and the Internet, and so China's economy is always booming. 

One day I can see the beautiful mountain villages becoming terrific tourist attractions, especially as the Chinese become more wealthier. 

Ed Balls, a British Labour politician, and once the 'genius' economic adviser to Gordon Brown, used to say that the less the government does, the better. The Chinese government doesn't seem to agree. Neoliberalism is not for them. 

The key factor that separates the U.S. and China is austerity. China’s planned economy and socialist governance system allows for the subsidization of the needs of the people to exist simultaneously with investments in high-tech industries. Upgrades in telecommunications technology and e-commerce, for example, have played important roles in the rising incomes of rural families and therefore have contributed to the overall policy of poverty alleviation in China. Technology under late stage U.S. capitalism serves as a weapon against the broad masses of people by raising their rate of exploitation as contending tech corporations battle over which can dominate the market faster. Technological development receives no assistance from the state unless in the form of military contracts for the production of weapons, bases, and other installations of war.  Danny Haiphong 

Danny Haiphong - American exceptionalism won’t save the U.S. Empire from itself, or stop China’s rise

The Chinese government is working to eradicate poverty in China, where much of it is in the villages high up in the mountains. The stunning countryside and views from these mountain villages could mean they will become terrific tourist attractions when the roads are fully in place and high-speed rail have linked all the towns. Even Westerners might want to go to holidays there. 

China is putting high-speed rail across the Himalayan mountains to the remote regions of Tibet, which is an enormous and very ambitious project. The trains goes so high up they need to have pressurised cabins, like airplanes have.

There are no places in China more beautiful than the villages on the tops of the Chinese mountains. They have the terraced rice fields and tea fields. They have the mountain streams and the clouds covering the peaks. They also have the struggle of poverty to contend with. Beauty and Wealth are two different things and this video delves into this particular subject.