Business Week Believes China is Broken
This week, those in China who buy Business Week might have a hard time finding a copy. Not because the July 23 issue will fly off the shelf, but rather these magazines might not make it past those Ministry of Information inspectors at the border. The cover story this week takes a look at the darker side of China’s economy and political climate and ponders whether the mainland is as strong as the world believes. Four authors collaborate on this piece to try and answer a question that has stumped me since I’ve been here: if the Chinese government can control information, population, property and religion, why can’t it control bottled water, cough syrup, toothpaste, seafood, toys and piracy? Is it that they can’t or that they don’t want to? Here is an excerpt from the July 23 issue of Business Week:
The same Communist Party apparatus so proficient at censoring the Internet can’t keep peddlers in the heart of Beijing from selling knockoff Callaway golf clubs and fake iPods, despite solemn promises to Washington since the early 1990s about enforcing intellectual property rights. Shanghai’s stock exchange may be one of the world’s hottest and may boast a state-of-the-art paperless trading system. But it was a casino when it opened in 1990 with eight listings, and after years of flaccid regulation it’s an even bigger casino with 1,118. Beijing proclaims all sorts of green initiatives, yet heavily polluting new factories and coal power plants keep going up. The party has talked for decades about building a social safety net, yet as the working population ages the government isn’t investing nearly enough to head off looming crises in health care, education, and pensions. China spends more than Japan on research and development, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), but its record of innovation is underwhelming.
Toward the end of the piece, the authors explain why China has a tradition of replicating existing technology as opposed to inventing its own, another question I’ve grappled with. I also like how China is represented on the cover as china. Nice touch.
•AP: Great Wall, Colosseum, Taj Mahal Among New 7 Wonders of the World
•New7Wonders Web Site