TruthNews Commentary, September 14, 2008

Three headlines from China yesterday caught my eye:

• 51 Believed Dead in Chinese Bus Crash

• China Detains 19 After 432 Babies Poisoned by Contaminated Milk Powder

• China Raises Death Toll From Mudslide to 254

All this made me think of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's recent comments regarding China. During the Olympics last month, Obama contrasted China's dedication with infrastructure development to America's supposed lack of infrastructure spending.

"Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now in the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business, you're starting to think, Beijing looks like a pretty good option. Why aren't we doing the same thing?"

I'm not sure by what measure Obama believes that China's ports, trains, and airports are vastly superior to ours, but there's no doubt that China has made a huge effort to improve its infrastructure. However, the improvements have come at great cost to the population. An article in Britain's Economist Magazine in February described the construction of Beijing's new airport terminal.

"It's like approaching the Forbidden City, it's absolutely incredible." The adjective is one that Mouzhan Majidi, chief executive of Foster + Partners, liberally attaches to Beijing's new airport terminal, designed by his British firm. The world's largest, designed in the gently sinuous form of a Chinese dragon, it was planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers.

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain, as Mr Majidi points out, it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow's Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing's new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing's third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents. Beijing is now planning a second airport (even with Mr Majidi's terminal, the current airport is expected to exceed its designed capacity of 60m passengers this year, seven years before schedule). The location is being considered in secret. Xu Li, an official at the Ministry of Communications' transport research institute, agrees that China's infrastructure expansion is not as restrained by rules as it is in America. Once a plan is made, it is executed. "Democracy", she says, "sacrifices efficiency."

An often heavy-handed approach to land appropriation also helps. For Beijing's airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and their more than 10,000 residents resettled nearby. But several of the former farmers told your correspondent that they were still barred from the unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges of city dwellers even though their farmland had been grabbed from them. One elderly man said that officials had threatened them with violence if they refused to leave their villages.

China’s approach to the Olympics was particularly brutal to the local population. An article in the London Sunday Times last month cites one example.

Thousands of Chinese farmers face ruin because their water has been cut off to guarantee supplies to the Olympics in Beijing, and officials are now trying to cover up a grotesque scandal of blunders, lies and repression.

In the capital, foreign dignitaries have admired millions of flowers in bloom and lush, well-watered greens around its famous sights. But just 90 minutes south by train, peasants are hacking at the dry earth as their crops wilt, their money runs out and the work of generations gives way to despair, debt and, in a few cases, suicide.

In between these two Chinas stands a cordon of roadblocks and hundreds of security agents deployed to make sure that the one never sees the other.

The water scandal is a parable of what can happen when a demanding global event is awarded to a poor agricultural nation run by a dictatorship; and the irony is that none of it has turned out to be necessary.

China's trains are also of questionable superiority to ours. China was the last nation on earth to convert from steam locomotives to diesel and electric. According to Wikipedia,

China continued to build mainline steam locomotives until late in the century, even building a few examples for American tourist operations. Since China was the last main-line user of steam locomotives, ending officially at the beginning of 2006, it is plausible that many still exist in industrial operations or in more remote parts of China. Many coal mines and smaller cities, such as Pingdingshan and Hegang, maintain an active roster of JS, SY, or QJ steam locomotives bought secondhand from China Rail. The last steam locomotives built in China were of the SY 2-8-2 class, built until 1999.

Beijing's pollution problems don't do much to attest to China's modernity. Despite banning most autos from Beijing in the week before the Olympics, smog still persisted throughout the games. The smog may not have been particularly noticeable in the Olympic arena, but in the long shots for the marathon, the thick smog was obvious. China's smog is so bad that they were exempted from the Kyoto Accord's requirements for reduction of greenhouse gases.

Regarding Obama's assertion that China's transportation infrastructure is "vastly superior" to America's, I did a quick check on Travelocity to see how airline fares compared between the two countries. For a round trip flight between Shanghai and Beijing, the cheapest fare was $268. For a round trip flight between Los Angeles and Seattle, a distance about twice as far as the distance between Shanghai and Beijing, the cheapest fare was $186. China's per capita income is $5,300. America's per capita income is $45,000. So a Chinese person, making a little more than a tenth of an American's salary would have to pay 50 percent more to go half as far in order to land at a "vastly superior" airport. By the way, the Chinese person would be flying on either a U.S. or European airliner because China’s communist government hasn't figured out how to build airliners yet.

It's not surprising that a left-wing proponent of state-sponsored enterprises like Obama would find much to praise about China. But as China illustrates, state-run projects are not always the models of efficiency that Obama thinks they are.

Obama's call for better infrastructure makes sense. But China is hardly the nation we should be emulating. Government spending can easily turn into a wasteful boondoggle as Obama's nearly billion dollars worth of earmarks over the last four years illustrate. America's democratic processes may slow things down, but democracy also ensures we don't make plans in secret that ruin the lives of thousands in order to build a Potemkin village to impress impressionable foreigners.