Wednesday, November 28, 2012

China needs peace in the Asia Pacific region and so do we!

Vanguard December 2012  p. 11
by Ned K.

While Hilary Clinton’s visit to Adelaide in November was headline news, there was no news coverage of the visit to Adelaide of Professor Tiejun Wen from The University of China.

Professor Wen is, among other roles, a member of the State Consultant Committees of Environment Protection and also Ministry of Trade Affairs. He was guest speaker of the University of Adelaide and Confucius Institute of the University of Adelaide.

While the focus of Clinton and the ALP leaders with her was the naval military capacity of Port Tech near Port Adelaide, Professor Wen’s focus was sustainability, overcoming inequality and environmental sustainability in China. Quite a contrast.

When asked what the most important issue is for the Chinese government and people today, he said without hesitation “peace”. He was critical of western press reports that China was expanding militarily; pointing out that the US has 47% of the world’s total military expenditure.

He said the western big powers should really look at themselves before accusing China of military expansionism. As an example he took the audience back to the 1930’s Depression and crisis of overproduction and asked, “How did the West recover from this? By World War 2”!

He then contrasted the response of China to an overproduction problem at the turn of the 21st century. Their response was a massive economic stimulus to their economy in western and north eastern China, an economy which had by then become the industrial workshop of the world, rather than by resorting to military solutions.

No matter what people in the West think of China, Professor Wen said, they have a mutual interest with the Chinese people in maintain world peace.

Building an ecological and sustainable civilisation

He said that the new Chinese leadership at the 18th Party Congress had committed to the task of turning China in to an ecologically sustainable civilisation. However, at the same time it needed to maintain an economic growth rate of at least 7% a year to prevent mass unemployment among young people. He said this was no easy task, and China was extremely vulnerable economically because it still had heavy reliance on oil imports from politically unstable regions of the world, in particular the Middle East.

The question of corruption

During the session, he was asked about the origins of bribery and corruption within the Chinese political leadership and how, if not addressed, this would undermine or even destroy the goal of building an ecologically stable civilisation.

He was very frank about this subject. He traced its origins to the growth of  financial capital markets in China in the early 1990s, and the fact that the central government in China has only 50% of government budget revenue overall in China, with the balance of 50% lying with regional governments.

He posed the question to the audience of whether the growth of financial markets in China in the 1990’s was a mistake. He answered by saying in one sense ‘yes’, because of the corruption problem in the country at high levels now.

Seeing the world through Chinese eyes

Everyone in the West has their own view about China and what China should or should not be doing. However listening to how they see themselves and their place in the world at this time is a worthwhile exercise.

That this visit by Professor Wen and what he had to say  received so little attention by the media or politicians here really says it all about Australia’s subservience to the US. On this point Keating is right, Australia needs to become an independent country regarding its place in the world, especially in relation to Asia and China.

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