File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 326


Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 07:17:39 +0000
From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Rev Thomas Malthus returns


James said:

> I think you would find it hard to argue
> that there had not been a considerable improvement in soil management.
>

James, you really ought to take a sabbatical from these lists and do
some reading (no offence).

Here is something to start you off (we may disagree with the underlying
attitudes of commentators like this, but we have to counter their arguments with
something more than bald assertion and codophobia):


                          China as an "Emerging" Nation
                        What It Means for the Rest of Us
                               by Lindsey Grant
                            ------------------------
                                   April 1996
               ---------------------------------------------
 China is not just an example of an industrializing nation. Alone, it is one
 fifth of the human race, and every nation has a stake in its future. The
 Chinese are cursed if they try to master their problems, damned if they don't,
 in trouble if they succeed and in worse trouble if they fail. And what is
 happening to China is happening, in varying degree, in other nations just now
 in the process of modernizing. Let me explain.

                             The Race Against Hunger

 The Chinese have a massive population program underway, epitomized in the slogan  "the one
child family." Unlike most poor countries, they are financing most of  it themselves. The program
involves very intense social pressures not to become pregnant after the first child, and to abort if
they do. There are various
 exceptions involving minorities, twins, peasant families with labor shortages.
 The program - like most campaigns in China - is not so totally effective as
 propaganda would suggest. (UN figures give total fertility - the average number
 of children a woman may be expected to have in her lifetime - in China right now
 as 1.95 children.) The program has been bitterly criticized abroad, particularly
 in the U.S., for coercion. It has in fact had its excesses, as have many of the
 campaigns launched in China.1 Yet they cannot afford to give it up.

 Let's look at their problem.

 China's population is 1.22 billion, growing just over one percent per year. The
 rate of growth is about like the U.S., but in China that works out to more than
 12 million people. Every year.

 Traditional agriculture in China could achieve food yields sufficient to[Image]
 support as many as seven persons per hectare of arable land, on a simple
 vegetable diet, but that was in only a few favored areas, under ideal
 conditions, and with massive human labor, legume rotations and the recycling of
 manure and nightsoil.

 Now, the population per hectare is 13 persons, and rising.2 And those people
 have gotten used to having a little meat, rather than living at or below the
 margin, as they used to, on a grain diet supplemented by a few vegetables and
 some vegetable oil. How did they do it?
                                The Nitrogen Fix

 A Canadian professor named Vaclav Smil asks a fascinating question: What was the most
important invention in the twentieth century? His unlikely answer: the
 Haber-Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia and therefore nitrogen, introduced
 in 1913.

 Nitrogen, Smil pointed out, is essential to chlorophyll, DNA, RNA, proteins and
 enzymes - in short, to life itself. There are only three natural atmospheric
 processes for converting atmospheric nitrogen, which is locked up in N2
 molecules, into a form usable by plants and animals: falling meteors,
 ozonization and ionization by lightning. The only biotic process is the creation
 of ammonia by various bacteria, most notably by the rhizobium bacteria that live
 symbiotically on the roots of legumes (such as peas and beans.)

 Nitrogen and water are the two most important limiting factors in plant growth.
 Until the Haber-Bosch process, humankind could obtain nitrogen only by green
 manuring with legumes and recycling nitrogen by spreading animal manure, guano from seabird
rookeries, and nightsoil.

 Yields per hectare are the critical issue in China. By and large, the land that
 can be farmed is being farmed, as is some that should not be farmed. Arable land
 is shrinking because of urban sprawl, industrialization, salination of fields,
 and desertification. The official figures show a decline of six percent in
 arable land from 1970-1991 and a loss in 1992 to urbanization alone at the rate
 of nearly 5 percent per decade.3 Those losses are particularly significant,
 since the land closest to cities gets the most nightsoil and is highly
 productive. Moreover, the amount of land per capita declines with population
 growth. Food yields must more than match population growth just to stay in
 place.

 That is where synthetic ammonia comes in. Its invention permitted agriculture to
 support an unprecedented population. By Smil's calculations, synthetic
 fertilizers now provide the nitrogen for about half the annual global crop
 harvest. To phrase the point more starkly: perhaps one-third of the people in
 the more crowded and land-poor third world countries would starve, were it not
 for synthetic fertilizer. Moreover, "virtually all protein needed for the growth
 of more than 400 million babies to be added in the eight populous but land
 scarce countries during the 1990s will have to come from synthetic nitrogen."4
 (China, of course, is one of the eight countries.) China escaped from
 subsistence agriculture by building fertilizer plants, starting in the
 mid-1950s. It has about reached the end of that road. China uses nearly three
 times as much fertilizer per hectare as the United States, but grain yields are
 only 87% as high, probably because they must farm poorer land in drier areas,
 and they have less experience with modern high yield hybrids and crop varieties.
 In some areas of heaviest application, the response to further fertilization in
 China is zero.

 Those are the limits that every nation encounters when it goes in for massive
 use of artificial fertilizer. China's situation is particularly tight, because
 it has so little arable land. It cannot go back to organic agriculture, with its
 much lower average yields. Smil points out that synthetic fertilizer furnishes
 roughly half the nitrogen in Chinese food production, and even if China reverted
 to subsistence consumption levels it would furnish 40 percent of the essential
 nitrogen. Despite its harmful environmental effects, it is essential. Without
 it, China would face mass starvation. Moreover, since China has long farmed
 substantially all its arable land and is using the available sources of organic
 nitrogen, any future increase in Chinese population will depend largely upon
 synthetic nitrogen, at a stage when the additional nitrogen produces very little
 food.

 To add to its woes, China is losing topsoil to erosion. A Chinese official told
 an environmental meeting in Hong Kong that one-third of arable acreage is
 seriously affected.

 Irrigation is pushing its limits. For one example: some 622 km. of the Yellow
 River went dry for nearly four months in the summer of 1995. It was a dry year,
 but the phenomenon was blamed in part on a nine-fold increase in irrigation from
 the river since 1950.5 Around Beijing, irrigation is being reduced to meet urban
 water needs.

 Every growing population is on an agricultural treadmill, but China is the
 ultimate example. It is in a race against time; they know they must solve their
 own problems. No supplier on Earth could feed them if they fail. Their birth
 control program must succeed, or they face a descent into starvation.

 Those who criticize Chinese family planning policies should perhaps consider
 their problem. As the Chinese Premier bluntly told ex-President Bush: "If
 China's population goes on increasing uncontrolled... China will land in a
 backward state and even head for self-destruction."6
                                China as Importer

 China is entering the world grain market on a massive scale just at the time
 when stagnating yields and competition from other emerging countries are making  that market
very tight.

 In the bad old days, China could not afford imported grain. If the crops failed,
 people starved. Then, as commercial fertilizers became available and food output
 rose, China briefly became a food exporter. That has changed again, and China
 now runs a net annual grain deficit around fifteen million tons, second only to
 Japan. As a result of their relaxation of controls and their economic boom, they
 can afford to buy grain. They need to for domestic reasons. The price of grain
 rose 60 percent in 1994. That is the kind of thing that leads to food riots.

 There has been something of an international intellectual skirmish as to how
 much grain China will need a generation hence, and where it will get it. The
 Worldwatch Institute projects a requirement for 479 million tons by 2030, of
 which 207 million tons would have to be imported, even if improvements in the
 Chinese diet should stop now. If the diet continues to improve to something like
 the level in Taiwan, Worldwatch projects the need at 641 million tons, 369
 million tons of which would have to be imported.7 That is nearly twice the
 present level of total world grain exports.

 China's Agriculture Minister responded with an ambitious goal of avoiding
 imports by raising grain production to 500 million tons in 2000 and 625-675
 million tons in 2020 - about 45 percent above current production. As the cynical
 would say: lots of luck.

 Other specialists, Chinese and foreign, offer a wide range of production
 projections and estimates of import requirements early in the next century,
 ranging from zero to 136 million tons per year.8 Nobody really knows, but nobody  is claiming
they will again be exporters.

 One does not need to take the astonishing Worldwatch Institute projections
 literally in order to agree with the thrust. They assumed a decline of 20
 percent in Chinese grain production as a result mostly of declining acreage and
 irrigation and stagnating yields. That may be pessimistic, but the Minister of
 Agriculture is extremely optimistic.

 Chinese imports will depend on how much they can afford - how much foreign
 exchange they can muster and what the price will be. I read the Worldwatch
 message as saying, not that they will buy that much, but that they will not be
 able to, because the world's importers will be competing bitterly for a limited
 supply.

 If they cannot raise the grain or import it, the Chinese government will have to
 tell the Chinese to tighten their belts. A lot of peasants may be reluctant to
 part with their grain and insistent on sharing in the benefits of a rising
 market for what they do sell. A very tough spot for government, and one that
 leads me to repeat the refrain: China's problems should not be worsened by
 rising population driven demand.

 If China had succeeded by now in its hope of reversing population growth, the
 specter raised by the Worldwatch projections would disappear. Population growth
 is the problem on both sides of the calculation. It raises demand, while it
 competes for farmland and demands more and more water from limited resources for  irrigation,
more housing, larger cities, and expanding industries.

 A less desperate parallel arises in connection with petroleum. One expert
 predicts that China's petroleum imports will rise fourfold to 1.4 million
 barrels per day by 2005.9 Imports at that scale would absorb about 5% of current
 world exports and would be competing with rising demand from other emerging
 countries. It would hasten the energy transition for the whole world. On the
 other hand, if it cannot buy the petroleum, China will intensify its use of coal
 - the "dirtiest" fuel - and nuclear power, the most dangerous. These both have
 profound environmental consequences for China and the world. Damned if they do, damned if
they don't.
                            Industry and the Peasants

 There are at least two Chinas. Not just the familiar China vs. Taiwan division,
 but the far more fundamental fission line between the prospering southern
 coastal cities and the peasantry, particularly in China's vast interior. Only a
 small part of China is participating in the present economic boom. The peasants
 know that some Chinese are getting rich, while they have financed the cities
 through grain levies and taxes. There have been riots and attacks on local
 government offices. It is not comfortable out there in the countryside.

 That division has far reaching implications. A restless and growing peasantry is
 in danger of losing the gains of the past thirty years, and the loss of
 expectations is a dangerous mood indeed. They are running out of farmland and
 crowding into overloaded cities, encountering a small business plutocracy, some
 prospering entrepreneurs and a small group of skilled workers who are "in the
 system."

 The Ninth Five Year Plan (1996-2000) addresses the problem with considerable
 candor. Rural and urban unemployment and the "polarization of rich and poor" are identified as
critical problems. One drafter, in presenting the draft plan, said
 "Unemployment was the deciding factor in setting the growth rate... the only way
 to keep unrest from boiling over... is to create a certain number of jobs."10

 The official figures on unemployment are indeed hair-raising. Aside from the
 cities, there are reported to be 450 million people in the rural work force, of
 whom 120 million are employed in rural industrial enterprises. Agriculture can
 use 200 million at most, leaving 100-200 million already surplus workers in
 rural areas by various officials' estimates. By 2000, the number is expected to
 be somewhere between 180 to 300 million.11 Look at those figures again. The
 rural unemployed alone may equal the total population of any other country in
 the world, other than India.

 To cap that, the government hopes to modernize farming along Western lines and
 proposes over time to shift 80 percent of farm labor into other work.

 The total labor force grows about 10 million every year. The cities also
 generate substantial unemployment as the government tries to reduce the padded
 rolls of state enterprises.


 This nightmare drives wages toward minimal subsistence levels. Quite reasonably, the poor want out. Witness
the desperate efforts by Chinese to get to the U.S.  even in the midst of a touted economic boom - and most of
those boat people come from a coastal province that is supposed to be prospering. There is even a governmental
"overseas employment agency" in one depressed Northeastern city to help Chinese to emigrate.12

 Because China's family planning program has succeeded pretty well, there is hope
 down the road. The number of young people entering their working years is
 already below the 1985 figure. It will fluctuate downward if China can hold its
 fertility down,13 thus ameliorating the unemployment problem.
                          Industry and the Environment

 Like most other people, the Chinese do not simply want to stay alive. They want
 to succeed, and the economic liberalization that Deng Xiaoping launched has
 created a class of people for whom that dream has become possible.

 China epitomizes some uncomfortable realities. The poor want to be rich; poor
 nations want to live like us.

 China is one of the world's fastest growing economies. GNP grew from 1991-1994 at an average annual rate of
11.7 percent. They plan a "more balanced" growth of 9.3 percent through 2000, and 8 percent from 2001-2010.
That would mean a seven-fold increase in 25 years. They hope to reach the per capita GNP level of a "middle
income developed country" by mid-century.14 They are talking of the median of OECD countries. Allowing for
projected Chinese population growth (UN 1994 medium projection), they are aiming at a total GNP more than 70
times as large as in 1990 - even assuming the OECD level stands still.

 They are not likely to get there, but in the process of trying they will
 generate some profound disturbances to themselves and the world. Their problem
 is that, having abandoned the Communist model (in fact if not in word), they
 have adopted the capitalistic model - conspicuous consumption and all - just as
 it begins to run against the realities of a small Earth. China produced 10,000
 automobiles in 1985 and 1.4 million in 1994. It hopes to treble that rate by
 2010. By then, they expect to have 40-50 million private automobiles.15 They
 could hardly have selected a worse way to go. Automobiles eat up land for roads
 and parking and the urban layouts they promote, and much of that land will come
 out of China's dwindling farmland. Their pollution may harm farm production. It
 will contribute carbon to global warming, which would be a disaster for
 low-lying coastal areas and would imperil food production if it leads to less
 rainfall in a hinterland already suffering from lack of water. Their demand for
 gasoline will eat up foreign exchange that the Chinese will need, to import
 food.

 In retrospect, it may seem a tragedy that the Chinese leaders, given the chance,
 did not set out to define a more benign course of modernization when they
 abandoned the Maoist rigidities. One could envisage a China built upon freer
 enterprise and the price mechanism, but organized around the countryside and
 smaller cities, emphasizing labor-intensive

There is a lesson here for other third world countries. That sudden tuck in
 the bottom of the Chinese pyramid, compared with the flaring African pyramid,
 means fewer children to support now, an eventual reduction in the huge number
 of unemployed, fewer mothers having babies in the next generation, and the
 hope for stopping runaway population growth. The comparison with Africa's
 plight is a dramatic argument for population programs. (UN 1994 Medium
 Projections) occupations and avoiding the energy intensive Western industrial models.
 Apparently, the leaders did not see the vision or did not feel they had the
 choice. Chinese want the things they see on television, and TV now reaches most
 villages. If their government fails in its ambitious plans, it will face a
 restive populace. If it succeeds, they may well choke themselves, and us.

 As with other nations that have been poor, China's leadership does not yet
 appreciate the penalties that growth will bring. Already, 86 percent of rivers
 in urban areas are regarded as heavily polluted. Shanghai alone dumps five
 million cubic meters of raw sewage into its rivers daily.16 Unwashed coal
 provides most of China's energy. The air is foul. Entrepreneurs are even setting
 up "oxygen kiosks" in some cities, where people can stop for a whiff of pure
 oxygen. Despite some help from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, Chinese environmental
leaders themselves say that they cannot afford to do all that needs to be done.

 China alone will not suffer. Already, acid precipitation from China is affecting
 western Japan. China has every intention of using its coal, and coal is the
 dirtiest fuel in terms of acid precipitation and the greenhouse effect. There
 are technologies that could help to lessen the damage. In the United States, we
 demand that power plants use limestone slurry scrubbers to lessen the pollution.
 We have developed coal gasification processes that would be competitive if oil
 were not so cheap. They capture most of the pollutants other than CO2.

 The world has a stake in helping China avoid inflicting irreparable damage on
 the atmosphere. It could make those technologies available on concessional
 terms, if China could be persuaded to use them. There are limits, however. In
 China most coal is used in small home stoves that are particularly dirty. They
 can be improved, perhaps by adding limestone to the coal briquettes they burn,
 but they will remain a dirty source of energy.17
                                China as Exporter

 The immense and under-utilized pool of cheap and trainable labor will keep
 Chinese wages low. If Chinese labor is organized, whether by Chinese
 entrepreneurs or multinational corporations, and if they can get their goods
 into foreign markets, they will drive wages down in labor-intensive industries
 wherever they have unrestricted entry. If they are closed out, the Chinese
 government will be sitting on that immense powder keg of people with nothing to
 do.

 The United States has been providing that market, which has grown from $1
 billion in 1980 to $39 billion in 1994. The U.S. China trade deficit is second
 only to that with Japan. The U.S. will probably begin to recover the deficit as
 China's grain needs rise, but as the imports soar there may be rising pressure
 to limit that access to the American market.

 The Chinese need us much more than we need them, as a market and a source of
 food. As the proud heirs of "The Central Kingdom", they undoubtedly resent it.
 This makes our politicians' moralizing to them about personal freedoms and their
 population policy particularly galling. They pretty much have to take it, but
 our politicians are building a tremendous tension of suppressed resentment. It
 is remarkable how insensitive nations can be to each other's needs.

 However that may be, the central trade issue is that China needs trade
 opportunities that the rest of the world, in attempting to save its own
 economies, may not be able to provide. Again, as with so many other things,
 population plays a central role. The Chinese are trying to work their way out of
 the box created by a growing labor force, and the graph suggests they have a
 chance. Let us not make it more difficult.
                                The Nervous Giant

 China may seem huge and invulnerable from the outside, but it is a nation trying
 to survive on very treacherous ground. The question is regularly asked: "what
 will China do with Hong Kong when it takes over in 1997." Perhaps a more
 important question is what Hong Kong will do to China. The Chinese leaders don't trust democracy. For a
century, they have tried to accommodate their ways of managing a huge nation to the needs of modernism.
Confucianism was their
 traditional political framework, and it didn't work. The experience of the
 Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has made clear to them that statism doesn't
 work. Communism as a belief and unifying force has eroded in China just as it
 did in the rest of the Communist world.

 China traditionally has broken apart when strong central government failed. Its
 leaders are intensely aware of that tradition. With the gradual passage of Deng
 Xiaoping from the scene, the succession issue is at the forefront of Chinese
 politics. Communism does not provide a reliable way to manage successions. This is a critical time for China,
and today's policies are not perpetual. One issue
 may become crucial: the one child policy was not introduced because the Chinese
 like it. The leaders knew they had to stop population growth, even at
 considerable political risk, to avoid future catastrophe. In the present power
 struggle, will they be able to stick to that policy, or will one or another
 leader, courting popularity, propose to revoke it? Or will it simply become
 unenforceable if central authority weakens? Population policy has shifted before
 in the political seesaw since the idea of family planning was first introduced
 in the mid-1950s. There are ominous reports of rising resistance in the
 countryside to the population program.

 We should perhaps consider that context when we evaluate the violent Chinese
 reaction when Hong Kong Governor Patten began to introduce direct elections into Hong Kong, just two years
before its 1997 reversion to China. The Chinese were not just throwing their weight around. Patten was
introducing a democratic
 precedent that the incorporation of Hong Kong into China will inject into the
 body politic, and the Chinese leaders are probably terrified at the injection.

 China faces an uncertain future. Some people perhaps would like to see it fail.
 I disagree. Aside from the human aspect - which is important - one can hardly be
 comfortable with the prospect of chaos and hunger in that much of the human
 race, in a major military power quite capable of producing modern armaments
 including atomic weaponry.

 On the other hand, if China succeeds, it will tighten an already tight world
 grain supply, hasten the end of the petroleum era and multiply the insults the
 human race is already inflicting on the environment.Environmentalism has been
 low among China's priorities, and it will take some tolerance and understanding
 to bring them to agree that they share our interest in protecting the
 environment.
                                    Migration

 Fail or succeed, China will probably generate migration. If they fail, there
 will again be hunger in China, and that raises the prospect of hungry Chinese
 pushing into any area where they can find land and food - not on a scale that
 would make much difference to China, but it would affect the neighbors. The
 Chinese have not traditionally been thought of as a nation of migrants, but that
 is a simplification. They have been pushing and drifting southward for over two
 thousand years. With a very few exceptions, they have not mounted invasions when they encountered a
sufficiently organized non-Chinese society, such as the Thai or Vietnamese, but the informal flow of migrants
into Southeast Asia continued.
 What Is At Stake?

 What does that all mean for the rest of us? We may see China becoming several
 things at once:

    * a new and aggressive exporter of low tech, high labor content goods,
      utilizing a vast pool of disciplined and trainable labor, and by their
      competition depressing world wages,
    * a major new bidder on world food and energy markets,
    * a desperately polluted coastal zone, adding substantially to the world's
      atmospheric pollution and contributing to global warming,
    * an impoverished, hungry and unemployed peasantry,
    * a rising source of migration, and
    * a region of instability comprising about one-fifth of humankind.

 Where does the logic of these trends force us? The only single solution that
 cuts across all those problems is the one the Chinese are already trying: an end
 to population growth.



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