the audit

Another China Story, and We’re Still No Smarter

Predicting the economic future of China is about as easy as swimming to it, but reporters need to delve beyond the safe and shallow waters of...
August 7, 2006

Predicting the economic future of China, in all its vastness and complexity, is about as easy as swimming to it. But since there are few stories more important, it seems a matter of some urgency, if not life and death, that more reporters delve beyond the safe and shallow waters of common knowledge, cliché and wishy-washiness.

A Barron’s cover story (subscription required) last week was quick to debunk the sorts of silly bromides that see a massive economy summarized in a few shiny office towers. And after reading that “Nearly all the economists, academics and other experts that Barron’s recently spoke with are bullish on China’s prospects,” we are inclined to cheer the author for having the guts to forcefully posit a decidedly bearish thesis. “Sino-Euphoria is overdone,” he writes. “A lot could go wrong.”

Ultimately, though, the story doesn’t take us very far. It provides little more than a laundry list of China’s problems — poor healthcare, pollution, corruption, bad loans, investment bubbles — that will be perfectly familiar to everyone with a passing interest in the country. It does not address the arguments of the China optimists, who are presumably just as aware of the problems as anyone else. And it offers very little of the original reporting and analysis that would add to our understanding.

Indeed, after reading this article, we feel as if we have just completed a quick Google search on “China and economy,” which makes us wonder whether that might be all the author did before he started typing. That, and the few phone calls he seems to have made to the usual quotable suspects at well-worn think tanks such as the Rand Corporation. Certainly, there is no evidence that the author talked to any Chinese people, with the exception of Pei Minxin, an employee of (you guessed it) a well-worn think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (in Washington, D.C.).

Pei offers this insight: China is a “neo-Leninist, decentralized predatory state.” We don’t doubt that this is representative of the opinions of most Chinese in central D.C., but we wonder whether the Chinese working in Shanghai’s shiny office towers, or even in Shenzhen’s factories, might have different opinions.

This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with searching Google or listening to talking heads. But stories, especially those with a resolute point of view, lack a reason for being if the author doesn’t supply new facts — preferably juxtaposed against the facts of his opponents, along with explanations as to why his are better.

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The Barron’s story attempts to do this only once. China optimists, we are told, claim that “a burgeoning middle class inevitably will bring democratization and create civil society.” But the optimists are wrong, says Barron’s, because “countries like South Korea and Taiwan made the leap from authoritarianism to multiparty democracy only after their per capita income was two to three times higher than China’s now is.”

The assumptions here are a bit dubious. Most optimistic forecasts do not hinge on China becoming democratic, and indeed such a transition could destabilize the country. It also seems unlikely that per capita income alone determines a nation’s political outcomes. And in any case, the optimists see per capita income rising at unprecedented rates. Why are they wrong?

The author doesn’t say. But, hey, at least that paragraph invited us to think and mentally participate in a debate, albeit one that was somewhat shallow and inconsequential. The rest of the story is composed of old information cited in isolation that begs the question, “So what?”

For example, we are told 650,000 people in China are HIV-positive, that “unlike in Maoist China … decent health care now is unavailable,” and China’s “food markets feature live creatures, some exotic, caged next to each other in an environment some think helps spread ailments to humans.”

So what?

We suppose the inference is that there could be a health crisis that will slow economic growth. But we also suppose that the optimists have reasons to be unconcerned by conditions that have been apparent since Mao, if not longer. Barron’s doesn’t mention those reasons, so we are not only bored by its argument, but asked to accept it blindly — which we are disinclined to do.

It is certainly fair to argue that China is no fiercer a dragon than Puff (the one from a misty land called Honah Lee). And truth be told, the Barron’s effort is better than most of the China material that appears in the press.

But this is a leading business publication’s once-in-a-long-while cover story about the world’s second-most-important market. It is not just desirous, but imperative to our national well-being that such stories offer information that is differentiated, more thought-provoking — and just plain better.

It might have helped, for starters, if the reporter had gone to China.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.