We have seen amazing building booms in every city - hundreds of huge apartment buildings being built one after another. I heard a lecture on the boat the other day that explained why - China has decided to relocate 250M farm peasants from the countryside to cities over the next 12 years. The problem that Chinese authorities is trying to solve is that the family farmers have tiny farms which are not enough to lift them out of poverty because there is no economy of scale like mechanization of farming, something that has happened naturally in the US over the past century. The Chinese need to aggregate these small family farms into large factory farms and move the rural families to the cities where they (hopefully) will move into the consumer middle class.
Since everything is centrally planned in China, this can't happen organically over the years like it did in the US, it must be centrally mandated and planned. Of course there are many problems, like corrupt local governments that steal the money that the peasants were supposed to get for their farms leaving them with no money to buy the apartment in the city that the are being forced to move to.
Anyone who thinks that China is going to soon rule the world doesn't understand the tremendous internal problems (like horrible pollution) that China will be dealing with.
No comments:
Post a Comment