Science Talk

VTR · Guest

The Capitalist Ground Shaken
By The Earthquake In China

By Li Onesto

27 May, 2008

Monday, May 12, 2:28 pm. A huge earthquake, registering 8.0 on the Richter scale, struck
Sichuan Province in southwest China. The violent shaking lasted more than a minute, leaving
towns and small cities flattened. On Sunday, May 25, a powerful aftershock struck, causing
thousands more buildings to collapse.

The death toll now stands at over 62,000 people. 160,000 have been injured. Five million left
homeless. More than 200,000 homes completely collapsed and four million were damaged.

The quake hit in the middle of the day when schools were in session—children were napping,
sitting at their desks, and playing in schoolyards. Some reports say 30-40 percent of the dead
were schoolchildren. In the town of Mianzhu alone, seven schools, including two nursery
schools, collapsed—burying more than 1,700 students.

*****

What happens when such a natural disaster occurs is profoundly affected by how a society is
organized. And many things about the nature of China have been revealed by this catastrophe.
Most people around the world watching this heartbreaking tragedy think China is a socialist
country, run by a communist government. But in fact, since the reactionary coup led by Deng
Xiaoping after Mao Tsetung’s death in 1976, China has been a capitalist country, dependent on
and subordinate to global imperialism. And some stark things about the exploitative and
oppressive nature of capitalist China have been revealed in the aftermath of this devastating
earthquake.

“Tofu” Schools Became Death Traps

Close to 7,000 schools, a disproportionately high number of buildings, were destroyed. In some
towns, an entire generation has virtually been wiped out.

Town after town, grief has turned to anger as parents accuse the government of shoddy
construction to save money. Pu Changxue, whose son died, crushed in a classroom, said: “This
was a tofu dregs project and the government should assume responsibility. We all know that
earthquakes are natural disasters. But what happened to our children also has human causes, and
they’re even more frightening.”

In Juyuan, a middle school collapsed. As many as 900 children were buried in the rubble, while
nearby buildings remained standing. One resident said: “Look at the building materials they
used. The cement wasn’t mixed with water in the right proportion. There are not enough steel
beams. The sand isn’t clean.”

There are supposed to be seismic regulations and requirements for different types of buildings.
But lack of money for education has meant old buildings have not been replaced. And many times,
even when new schools are built, shoddy material is used and building codes are ignored in
order to save money.

The bodies of kids pulled from the rubble have revealed an ugly truth about class society in
China: That schools for kids from the bottom layers of society are very different than schools
for students from well-off families. Children from the upper strata get a better education.
They also get safer schools. And when the earthquake hit, this became a question of life or death.

According to a New York Times article, in Dujiangyan, the Xinjian Primary School had been
poorly built and “never got its share of government funds for reconstruction because of its low
ranking in the local education bureaucracy and the low social status of its students.” The
parents who sent their children to Xinjian are poor. Many had lost their jobs when a local
cement plant shut down—some collect small welfare payments and hold down odd jobs to support
their families, others had left their children behind to look for work somewhere else. Hundreds
of children died at Xinjian when the earthquake hit. Meanwhile, another local primary school,
Beijie, suffered hardly any damage and students survived. Beijie was set up for the elite with
the best facilities and finest teachers. (NY Times, “Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools
Crumbled,” May 25, 2008)

Western media, as well as news reports in China, have suggested that developers tried to
maximize profits by using inferior materials, cutting back on necessary work and paying off
corrupt officials. The Chinese government has announced there will be investigations into
whether sloppy work linked to corruption is to blame. And there will, no doubt, now be official
accusations of bribery, scapegoats, and a campaign to “clean up corruption.”

But the fundamental problem here is NOT corruption, inept administrators, or bribery in the
building of schools. Yes, that is truly horrible and resulted in the deaths of thousands of
children. But targeting this doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The real problem here is
the dynamics of capitalism—how the drive for profit trumps everything else, how economic growth
is driven by intensifying exploitation, short-term gain, and cost minimization. And how these
capitalist economic relations get reflected in and played out in the social and political
relations in society and the thinking of people. Corruption is very real, but it is an
outgrowth of capitalist development.

Some people say the problem is that there is not enough transparency in China. They pose the
problem as: China being open or shut; listening or not; censoring the Internet or leaving it
alone, etc., etc. But all this begs the fundamental question: What kind of society is China?
What is its relationship to global capitalism? What does it mean that China has become a vast
sweatshop for the world; that the gap between rich and poor in China is growing; that peasants
in the countryside are desperate and impoverished—and that the lives of millions who were
already desperately poor because China is subordinate to imperialism have been suddenly thrown
into an even greater hell by this earthquake?

Widening Inequality Gap

Sichuan is one of China’s poorest areas and does not have a lot of manufacturing. But this
province is an important grain and pork producer and has China’s largest reserves of natural gas.

Over the last decade there has been a burst of construction in rural, inland areas like
Sichuan. But the huge inequality gap between urban and rural areas remains. And this gap has
been further imprinted in the whole way that these smaller towns and cities are being developed.

Many in the areas most affected by the earthquake are poor peasants. In Wenchuan, at the
epicenter of the quake, the average annual income was around 1,600 yuan in 2002 (latest
available statistics), which is less than a fifth of the average income in the province’s
capital city of Chengdu. The death, damage and suffering from the earthquake reflect this
income gap. Living in more impoverished conditions to begin with resulted in greater
devastation and now more ongoing hardship. And inequality between the city and countryside also
impacts things. For example, people in rural areas have access to much less health care than
those who live in the cities. This means they are less healthy to begin with and now have less
access to desperately needed medical attention.

When China was truly a socialist country, a conscious goal of the government and society was to
continually narrow (and eventually get rid of) inequalities in society—between different
classes, between men and women, between different nationalities, and between the cities and
countryside. But now, through the workings of capitalism, such differences are being widened.

Time magazine has written about how “economic reforms” have chipped away at the medical
treatment available when China was socialist—health care that was often rudimentary but widely
available to all citizens: “China’s famed ‘barefoot doctors,’ usually middle school graduates
trained in first aid, hiked through hamlets offering prenatal examinations and setting broken
limbs. The service, essentially free, helped to almost eradicate sexually transmitted diseases
in China and nearly doubled the country’s life expectancy from 35 to 65 between 1949 to the
mid-1970s. But in the early 1980s, the mainland began shifting from communism to capitalism,
and peasants had to dig into their own tattered pockets to pay for health care. At the same
time, cash-strapped local governments cut subsidies to rural hospitals and clinics, essentially
privatizing them... City dwellers remain better-off, mostly because six in 10 of them have some
form of health insurance. Only 10% of rural residents do, and most of them are government
employees or live in wealthy coastal areas, where many work in factories.” (China’s Failing
Health System, Time, May 12, 2003)

This kind of deepening economic and social inequality now exists in many different aspects of
Chinese society—which can mean the difference between life and death when an earthquake hits.

Get-Rich-Quick Development

Over the last several decades China has become more integrated into and subordinate to the
world capitalist system. Foreign investments have poured into China. Fortune 500 companies with
investments in Sichuan include Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, United Technologies,
McDonalds, Lufthansa, Sony, Intel, Cisco Systems, and Archer Daniels Midland.

There has been all kinds of fast-paced “get rich quick” economic development. This has mainly
been concentrated in the country’s eastern coastal areas where there are concentrated pools of
cheap labor and access to shipping. But in recent years, this kind of rapid economic growth has
branched out into interior areas, including into the cities and towns hit by the May 12 earthquake.

In many cases, such expansion has meant people being forcibly relocated. This push for rapid
growth forces builders to move fast. And this has led companies and the government to trample
on the rights of residents and ignoring building safety requirements. Policemen have been sent
in to enforce evictions. And there have been several reports of people protesting demolitions
and evictions by setting themselves on fire and committing suicide.

Five years ago, these massive renovations were mainly happening in large cities. Now they are
going on in more medium and smaller cities—like Sichuan’s capital of Chengdu, about 145 miles
from the epicenter of the earthquake. City officials there had announced plans to spend 10
billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) to build a new town in its northern suburbs.

Thousands of smaller cities are sprouting up on formerly uninhabited pastureland. This rapid
urbanization has transformed Sichuan into one of China’s biggest provinces with a population of
82 million. It is this kind of demolition and quick construction that has created conditions
for rampant corruption, leading to the kind of slipshod building that people are now pointing
to in the wake of the earthquake. It is these rural areas and smaller towns that suffered the
greatest destruction from the earthquake.

This kind of economic development—driven by short-term gains, rapid growth, and cost
minimization—has also factored into the building of dams in China. And now, in the wake of the
earthquake, there is an extremely dangerous situation where shoddily-built dams are damaged,
putting millions in harm’s way of potential flood waters—especially given continuing aftershocks.

There have been reports that hundreds of dams have been damaged by the earthquake. For example,
the Zipingpu Dam, completed in 2006, was built over the objections of seismologists who were
concerned about its proximity to major geological faults. After the earthquake, soldiers rushed
to the dam after reports that it was developing cracks.

Crocodile Tears Covering Up a Criminal System

Some news commentators have said this earthquake is a “godsend” for the Chinese
government—pointing to the fact that world political opinion has not been going well for China.
Its brutal repression in Tibet captured headlines for weeks, just as China was getting ready
for its mega-PR campaign around the Olympics. There were numerous protests as the Olympic torch
made its way around the world.

Now the earthquake has given China an opportunity to turn public opinion more favorable to
China’s reactionary regime. Top government officials quickly flew to the devastated areas,
crying crocodile tears and putting on a show of concern for TV cameras—knowing this would be
beamed not only throughout China but around the world. The Chinese government is highly aware
that, especially in the wake of the cyclone in Myanmar, its handling of this disaster is being
closely watched, throughout the country and internationally. The storyline has been how
competent, compassionate, and in control the rescue and relief efforts have been.

The rulers of China face a lot of necessity here—both domestically and internationally. They
need to keep social control in the face of growing disparity and discontent. And they face a
complex and changing economic and political polarization in the world as they try to press
forward with their international ambitions. From the very beginning, the Chinese government has
seen the Olympics as a way to create more favorable political conditions, both domestically and
internationally.

The crocodile tears being shed by government officials after the earthquake only serve to cover
up the real truth: The Chinese economy is deeply integrated into and subordinated to the global
capitalist system. The development of capitalism in China has been and continues to be a living
nightmare for hundreds of millions of people. And what China really needs is another revolution
aimed at overthrowing the new capitalist ruling class, re-achieving national independence, and
creating a genuine and truly liberating socialist society.

Li Onesto is a writer for Revolution (revcom.us) and author of the book, Dispatches from the
People's War in Nepal, (Pluto Press and Insight Press, 2004)

john fernbach · Guest

On May 29, 5:15 pm, Rudy Canoza <pi...@thedismalscience.noot> wrote:

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 08:25:50 -0500, VTR wrote:

Rudy Canoza · Guest

mimus wrote:

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 12:07:42 -0700, Rudy Canoza wrote:

Rudy Canoza · Guest

mimus wrote:

Rudy Canoza · Guest

john fernbach wrote:

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 14:15:42 -0700, Rudy Canoza wrote:

Rudy Canoza · Guest

mimus wrote:

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 16:19:14 -0700, Rudy Canoza wrote:

Rudy Canoza · Guest

mimus wrote:

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 16:41:54 -0700, Rudy Canoza wrote:

tankfixer · Guest

In article <2sGdndeetf5coKLVnZ2dnUVZ_o7inZ2d@giganews.com>, tinmimus99
@hotmail.com says...

mimus · Guest

On Thu, 29 May 2008 19:07:22 -0700, tankfixer wrote: