Remember the names? THE WARNING: THE COMING GREAT CRASH IN THE STOCK MARKET, Y2K - IT'S ALREADY TOO LATE, CONQUER THE CRASH, THE COMING CRASH IN THE HOUSING MARKET, PATRIOTS: SURVIVING THE COMING CRASH, THE COMING COLLAPSE OF THE DOLLAR AND HOW TO PROFIT FROM IT, and, of course, the greatest (and silliest) doomsday collection of all time, THE LEFT BEHIND SERIES. Doom will always have its day, Chicken Littles will watch and read and fret, authors and publishers will collect their take, and the unfilled prophecies of ruin will soon be forgotten in the wake of a newer batch. And thus it is with Gordon Chang's THE COMING COLLAPSE OF CHINA.
Published in 2001, Chang argues that China's deeply entrenched and long-standing economic difficulties, the Communist Pary's intransigence and desperate efforts at self-preservation, and the country's coming accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will combine to create the necessary conditions for revolution and overthrow. All that will be needed will be the right spark and the emergence of the right leader to take advantage. The thesis is, of course, plausible enough, but what doomsday prophecy doesn't have its elements of plausibility? Marshal enough arguments on one side of any issue and ignore the counterbalancing factors, and any situation can start looking like an imminent crisis.
This type of one-sided presentation is, unfortunately, precisely what Mr. Chang gives us. He is clearly knowledgeable about China, and he certainly identifies most of the country's major problems: bankrupt State-owned enterprises (SOE's), technically insolvent banks with huge quantities of non-performing loans, a ruling party lacking in ideas and the political will to change, a government addicted to creeping incrementalism out of fear of losing control, stifling of private enterprise and innovation, declining quality of life for millions of peasants, and the people's own access to information, and to each other, via the Internet. Yet at the same time, he either ignores or diminishes the importance of foreign investment capital, building of thousands of new factories, a seemingly inexhaustible pool of cheap and willing labor, the Chinese people's own rampant entrepreneurialism, and their enormous drive for material goods and a better life.
Chang's writing style tends toward the dry and overly repetitive, as if saying something often enough will make it so. His arguments are often perceptive, yet at the same time they sound heavily opinionated, lacking in substantive supporting detail or statistics. His writing is best when he humanizes it, telling us stories of individual Chinese people - more of this would have been better. `
Chang's book is also littered with odd inaccuracies and unfairly negative interpretations that left me questioning the merits of his bigger arguments. On the lesser side, for example, he incorrectly identifies pop singer A Mei (Zhang Huimei) as "Ah Mei" and describes internationally renowned architect I.M. Pei as born in Guangzhou. Pei himself says (in a June, 2004 interview in Archtectural Record) that he was born in Suzhou. Chang twice describes the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou as "aging" and once as "dingy" - it is no such thing (I was there in 2002, 2003, and 2004). He also claims the Chinese government makes Westerners stay if they are adopting Chinese babies from Guangzhou - wrong on both counts. The babies come from all over China, and the adoptive parents stay at the White Swan because it is a five minute walk from the American Consulate where they will pick up their infants' American travel visas. More disturbing, he disparages Western companies' first mover advantage as nonexistent while ignoring the experiences of KFC, Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Polo, Budweiser, P&G's Crest and Pampers brands, Nestle's, and VW. Chang inappropriately equates China's 40% national savings rate as a vote of no confidence in the government, ignoring the lessons of decades if not centuries of historical experience and upheavals as well as cultural tradition (such as parents saving to buy a home for their son and his new bride). He also manages to describe Internet usage in China as "hobbled" even as it grew from October 1997 to December 2003 at a compound rate of over 100% per year!
THE COMING COLLAPSE OF CHINA is an informative book for those not familiar with China, as it offers good insight into the country's economic, political, and social systems and their shortcomings. The danger is that the reader will come away with a profoundly negative and pessimistic view of China beyond what the country warrants. Imagine the roles being reversed, with Chinese people reading about America's negatives (rabid political polarization, manufacturing job loss, staggering corporate frauds and bankruptcies,decaying infrastructure, broken health care system, low-functioning educational system, massive government budget deficits and trade imbalances, terrorism, gun crimes, religious fundamentalism), and you see the problem.
