Red Guards Carrying Credit Cards: U.S.-China Relations and the Future

Moderated by Bonnie Glaser, Senior Fellow, CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies

 

In October 1999, the then Chinese President Jiang Zemin stood atop a classic Red Flag limousine driving through the main gate of Tiananmen, where emperors of past dynasties were once carried on palanquins. Under the stoic gaze of Mao Zedong’s portrait the spectacle was an irony of communist imagery against a momentum of awakening capitalism. One could not help but wonder how China in the decade ahead, self-espousing its own peaceful rise, would synergize these juxtapositions. To western observers they appeared incongruous. Yet to Chinese, everything seemed to fall into a consistent context.

 

Zhu Rongji’s half-decade premiership witnessed one of the largest spectrums of financial, economic and enterprise reforms in the world’s history. Large influx of foreign investment and reverse brain drain characterized an era of unfettered capitalist enthusiasm in China. Leveraging on former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s adage, “To get rich is glorious,” the CCP began to machinate reforms that would dismantle China’s nearly half-century stagnant state planned system, displacing it with one that can only be described as Adam Smith’s wildest dreams on steroids.

 

Against the backdrop of increased foreign investment, globalization of management and education, the 2001 entry into the WTO, and hosting of the 2008 Olympics, many speculate that China would rise peacefully as a global power and share with its weight equal responsibility. However, in the context of China’s sustained hyper-economic growth model, Beijing feels certain of its economic assumptions that people care only about getting rich. Contaminated environment and lost ethnic identity are dismissed as selfish concerns abandoned for the greater benefit of everyone getting rich. As the goose-stepping parade saunters by Tiananmen, the message ten years on will be clearer than it was a decade ago. China is ready to take on the world, but is the world ready to take on China?

 

Laurence J. Brahm is a global activist, international crisis mediator, political economist and author.   A lawyer and economist by profession, during the 1990s Brahm served as an advisor to the central banks of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, guiding them on financial reforms in their transition from socialism, and to Mongolia on enterprise restructuring.  Author of more than 20 books on the Asian region, Brahm has covered a wide spectrum of topics in his writings. These include economic development, financial reform and monetary policy in China and Southeast Asia, as well as new-era travel in Tibet. 

 

His complete bio can be found on his website: http://www.laurencebrahm.com/bio