SUSTAINED ECONOMIC GROWTH



Sustained Economic Growth

Sustained Economic Growth

Introduction

China today is undergoing a consumer revolution, a revolution which is as far reaching and radical as the political, social, and cultural revolutions that preceded it. Today the Chinese people consume unprecedented amounts of goods, services, and experiences, and dream of consuming far more. And, as China becomes more affluent, such domestic consumption has come to play an increasingly important role in promoting and prolonging China's unprecedented economic growth. Consumption has also played a less obvious but equally important political function, as it has allowed the Chinese state to divert public attention from China's growing social and environmental problems (Amsden 1999 78-117).

Discussion

While state-guided consumption may have helped to promote economic growth and to protect the party's hold on power, it has also produced increasing social unrest and unequalled environmental devastation. Such tensions have been particularly evident in three key sectors: the auto industry, the housing industry, and the tourist industry. In each of those areas, increasing consumer demand is placing more and more pressure on the Chinese state, society, and environment. Increasingly, Chinese consumers are caught in a classic “tragedy of the commons”, where their individual desires result in socially and systemically catastrophic outcomes (Romer 2006 1002-37).

As China's population continues to grow and to grow richer, those crises are only likely to become yet more severe in the years to come. This paper will explore these issues. By analyzing consumption and environmental degradation in contemporary China, it will explain how and why the Chinese people and the Chinese state have become entangled in this increasingly contradictory and self-defeating trajectory of economic development and environmental destruction. In addition it will argue that the Chinese state has sought to legitimate itself through selling consumption to its rising middle class, and indicate why that strategy may no longer work. The paper begins by examining the origins and consequences of China's new consumerism, placing particular emphasis on the growth and diffusion of a shopping culture in China's new middle class. Next, it assesses three other flashpoints in the relations between consumerism, environmental degradation and the state: automobiles and transportation; land use and development; and tourism (Takenaka 2025 78-947). As we will see, these issues show particularly well the pressures which Chinese state and society currently confront, pressures which threaten to destroy the delicate balance between economic growth, political control, and environmental protection in China today.

Creating the Chinese Consumer

The roots of today's consumer revolution lie in the late 1970s, when the Chinese state began to implement a variety of policies that would radically transform Chinese society. The most important of these were the economic reforms which followed Deng Xiaoping's rise to power in 1978, the political crackdown following Tiananmen, and the one-child family policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Not only did the economic reforms provide the means and impetus to the astounding economic growth which followed - growth which has averaged over 8 percent annually 2 for more than 25 years! - they also began to ...