by Wei Jingsheng

According to the great dissident, the U.S battle (and now also Europe’s) to have the Yuan revalued is a sign that the alliance between Western capitalism and the Chinese regime is at an end. This alliance was born from the greed of a few Western investors, who married Beijing’s corruption and indifference towards its own population. It benefited only a few. The American and the Chinese people were excluded.

Washington (AsiaNews) –In East Asia, recent attention has been given to disputes over the Senkaku islands, known as the Diaoyu islands to Chinese and the Pinnacle Islands in English.  In fact, these islands are not particularly significant for the Chinese people's fate.  In an effort to maintain its one-party dictatorial regime, the Chinese Communist Party has been bought out by international forces, in a way of betraying territories and interests that are much greater than this.  We should be more concerned about the rights and interests of ordinary Chinese.  Such is the future of China.  Such is the most relevant and important issue to our people's fate.  Here, I am talking about the trade sanction resolution debate in the US Congress.  (This bi-partisan resolution has the official title H.R.2378 - Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act.)

Even though the trade imbalance between China and the USA has fattened a group of capitalists and also indirectly enriched a group of bad politicians in the US, still the USA is a democratic nation trying to put its people first.  When popular discontent rises, more and more politicians have to stand on the side of the people or have to leave the post which they represent.  This truth would be a dream of vain hope in a movie in China, yet it is a reality in the USA that even children know.

Although this H.R.2378 has not reached the House floor for a vote yet, already almost half of the US representatives have co-sponsored this resolution.  Now the only issue left is for the Speaker of the House to pick the date and to line it up for a vote.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi has very clearly stated an attitude to align herself with the people.  Although commerce that represents the interest of the big businesses and the Chinese Communist Party has been lobbying very hard against it, for once it has not been effective.  To this date, we have not seen any representative dare to make a contradictory resolution or even a compromise version.  Therefore, it is only a matter of time to pass this resolution in the US Congress without too much suspense, unless the Chinese Communist regime immediately increases value of the Chinese currency RenMinBi by a substantial amount. [H.R. 2378 passed the House on Wednesday 29 September with a vote of 348 - 79, after Mr. Wei wrote this article on September 24, 2010 -ed].

The motive for the Americans to balance the US-China trade and eliminate the trade deficit is very obvious.  It is to restore the vitality of the U.S. economy and walk out of the economic crisis.  Most people are aware that the economic crisis has been caused by the huge foreign trade deficit maintained over a long period of time.   The main cause of this deficit is due to the unreasonable cheap labor maintained by the Chinese Communist regime.  There are two main ways to maintain cheap labor.  One is to suppress the trade unions and human rights movement like what the Chinese government do.  The other is to maintain the below-market price of the Chinese currency, RenMinBi.

When the Chinese currency is undervalued, the price of all Chinese export is undervalued, which makes it artificially very competitive.  This is the true reason that Chinese goods of poor, fake and shoddy quality can fill the Western markets.  Indeed, China does have a lot of goods that meet international standards, due to its technological advances and import of foreign advanced technology.  However, there are many more products that rely solely on low price to gain a competitive edge, making the China name synonymous with shoddy material while unreasonably crowding out the markets of Western enterprises.

This activity has resulted in two strange global phenomena in the past decade.  The first is that product quality is getting worse.  The second is that wealth is becoming more concentrated.  On one side, the rich countries are getting poorer, while the poor countries are getting richer.  On the other, regardless of rich or poor country, rich people are getting richer while poor people are getting poorer.  The Gross Domestic Products are growing in both poor and rich countries, yet their market consumptions are relatively in decline or stagnation.  This asymmetry between production and consumption is the root cause of the entire economic crisis.  And, the main cause that produced this economic crisis is the extreme expansion of production in China, while consumption is stagnating.

An important means to export this unbalance to the whole globe is from the joint participation between China's exporting trade and Western capital.  A product produced by cheap labor in China replaces an American worker who would make 20 to 50 times more in income.  So even if the products are sold at half of the price, the profit is significantly increased, while the shared consumption decreased.

Where has the money gone?  Into a rapid increase of the wealth of select individuals globally.  Increased wealth in the middle class and poor would bolster the consumer market.   Increased wealth of the already wealthy does not.  Instead, these wealthy people put their money into investment and the financial market.  This false investment is the major source of the economic crisis: there is a capitol surplus, a production surplus, yet the global market consumption capacity cannot respond.  This phenomenon first appeared in China, then via the unfair trade relationship got exported to the world (primarily to Western developed countries, because initially consumers there were seduced by the lower prices) to maximize the profit.

The cheap labor in China is maintained by the suppression of the workers and maintaining a low RMB value.  However, only with a high price market in the West, can the maximum profit be realized.  So the Chinese model has adopted a basic principal of Marxism: the Western democracy is a democracy of the capitalists.  By way of benefit sharing, they were able to buy these Western capitalists, thus help to buy Western politicians and control Western politics for the Communist Party.  On this issue, Deng Xiaoping is more a Marxist than Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong.

But Marx was more a cynic, rather than a scholar.  His theory must be revised to fit with reality.  When the controlled Western politics fattens the Nazi or the Communist Party, Western politics itself will have problems.  Although the people's reaction maybe slower, ultimately, people have rights and the vote.  Neither money nor power can block the people's mouth.  This is the importance of freedom of speech.  This is the essence of the Western-style democracy.  After the American people found out this plot by the capitalists and politicians in both China and the USA, gradually they are forcing the Western politicians to retreat from the situation that makes these capitalists and politicians rich at the expense of the people.  This is the initiative for the USA to have trade sanctions against China.

The Chinese Communist Party and its propaganda tools have always tried to spread the opinion that the current status of the Sino-US trade maintains cheap consumer goods in the West while ensuring the employment of Chinese workers.  This seemingly correct theory is actually a deception.  The current global economic crisis has exactly proved that it is a deception.  While the Western consumers indeed benefited from more than a decade of low priced consumption, it was exactly this irrational over-consumption that deprived them of their jobs.  Nowadays, many people cannot or dare not face cheap goods anymore.  The Western economy has not become more prosperous due to this cheap consumption; peoples' lives have become more difficult.

China's situation is even more tragic.  When people are thinking that maintaining the Japanese model of low priced exports could develop China's economy, while migrant peasant workers are cheering for the jobs that they might find in the export business, quietly, many others are losing their jobs and benefits.  By the Chinese government's own statistics, the Chinese people's consumption level has not grown in synchronization with the production growth.  To use genteel words by an academic scholar: China is a factory of production for the world.  The value that the consumer market has lost has become the wealth of the capitalists and corrupt officials in China and the world.  American society and its people do not enjoy much of the fruits of economic growth, and the Chinese society and its people have even less.

Therefore, many Chinese people have begun to cherish the Mao era. The fact is that Mao Zedong's ideas and ways already met their end and were proven to be wrong long ago, and now Deng Xiaoping's ideas and ways are also proven to be wrong and coming to an end.  For China to have a normal development that could be sustained, we must let our people live a life that matches their production ability.  The whole world must open a new political and economical path.

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