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China's new revolution: China's economic transformation is built on mass faith in markets and technology and a disregard for workers.

Article Excerpt
In 2005 the Australian and Chinese Governments are moving to fast-track a 'free trade agreement'. The agreement is to be negotiated just as Chinese opposition to marketisation and free trade escalates. A key confrontation looms with NGOs already organising a mobilisation against the regional meeting of the World Trade Organisation to be held in Hong Kong in December 2005. There is growing discontent as agricultural imports undermine peasant incomes, urban living standards plummet and insecurity grows along with informalisation and yawning inequality. Reflecting this, the Chinese non-government sector has become a vocal critic of free trade and marketisation. Australia-based campaigners against the proposed free trade agreement will find many like-minded sceptics in China. But what is the source of this discontent? What are its dynamics?

Mainstream accounts rate China as resolutely on the capitalist road, its peoples embracing consumerism and market 'freedoms'. Certainly, China's command market--what Chinese authorities call 'market socialism'--has unleashed forces of production of unprecedented power. Over the last twenty years, many of the cities of Eastern China have undergone an astounding transformation. Elite assertions of economic success, of China entering the 'information economy', are laced with more than a touch of triumphalism. The legendary Yangtse, says one of China's sociologists, is flowing from tribal to peasant to industrial and now to information society. From its upper reaches to its Shanghai delta, the river is a metaphor for the developmental transformation of the world's most populous country. The flow, though, is not so smooth, and is less and less predictable.

The last twenty years has seen a frenzied embrace of state-directed marketisation. Rural society is now founded on peasant householders who farm individual plots for subsistence and cash crops. As agricultural productivity has increased, rural incomes have slumped. As commodity prices have fallen, the 800 million people who live on the land--two thirds of...

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