Modernisation of China
with harmony between humanity and nature
The modernization of China with harmony between humanity and nature will provide a more viable pathway to a clean and beautiful world, (read China’s Consul-General, Kota Kinabalu, Dr. Huang Shifang speech at the National Day Reception).
Indeed, China’s approach to building an ecological civilization is entirely different from anything that exists in the Western world. China’s goal is to alter the whole developmental model and way of life by establishing a viable economic structure that facilitates green, low-carbon and circular development thereby promoting a thorough transition towards eco-friendly economic and social development.
It is also an economic development model that even World Bank acknowledges since Chin opened up and reformed its economy in 1978. China’s GDP growth has averaged over 9 percent a year, and more than 800 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty. There have also been significant improvements in access to health, education, and other services over the same period.
World Bank and DRC have identified the whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach in this economic development endeavour. With a socialist praxis, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
In a joint study – “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China: Drivers, Insights for the World, and the Way Ahead” – undertaken by China’s Ministry of Finance, the Development Research Center (DRC) of the State Council, and the World Bank, with the China Center for International Knowledge on Development (CIKD) acting as the implementing agency, the report looks at the key drivers of China’s poverty alleviation achievements over the past 40 years, considers the insights of China’s experience for other developing countries and puts forward suggestions for China’s own future policies.
“China’s battle against poverty has benefited the largest number of people in human history,” said Minister Ma Jiantang, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group of the DRC. “To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”
“China achieved its goal of poverty reduction in the new era as scheduled at the end of 2020”, said Yu Weiping, Vice Minister of Finance. “We have accomplished the arduous task of eliminating extreme poverty, and made significant contributions to global poverty reduction. Going forward, China will continue to sustain and expand the gains in poverty alleviation and comprehensively realize rural revitalization. The Ministry of Finance will ensure that sound fiscal policy measures will be made and implemented to support the transition. We stand ready to continue strengthening cooperation with the World Bank in relevant areas.”
“China’s poverty reduction story is a story of persistent growth through economic transformation,” said Manuela V. Ferro, World Bank Vice President for East Asia and Pacific.
China’s approach to poverty reduction has been based on two pillars, according to the report. The first was broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support was initially provided to areas disadvantaged by geography and the lack of opportunities and later to individual households. The report points to a number of lessons for other countries from China’s experience, including the importance of a focus on education, an outward orientation, sustained public investments in infrastructure, and structural policies supportive of competition.
The report also highlights how the success of China’s economic development and the associated reduction of poverty benefited from effective governance, which helped coordinate multiple government agencies and elicit cooperation from non-government stakeholders. To illustrate the role of broad-based economic transformation in poverty alleviation, separate sections of the report analyze growing agricultural productivity, incremental industrialization, managed urbanization and rural-to-urban migration, and the role of infrastructure. The evolution of China’s approach to poverty alleviation, from place-based to country-wide social protection policies, and the targeted poverty alleviation strategy since 2012 are also reviewed.
The whole-of-society approach is not well executed in the Malaysian 70-year neocolonialism experience and the whole-of-government is practically an clientel ethnocapitalism immersion. Wherein the TAPAO (Targeted Area-based Poverty Alleviation Objectives) PRAXIS (Poverty Reduction and Extra-Developmental Initiative Schema) definitely need to be the practice on socialism with Malaysian characteristics in any economic development endeavour towards common prosperity within a wealth-sharing society.
What progressive left has had also often neglected is that in line with both traditional Chinese civilization and Marxism, one has to recognize that the concept of ecological civilization was not quite enough, and that it needed to be supplemented by Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution - an Ecological Marxist Perspective, that is, our aesthetic relation to nature, and thus the intrinsic value of nature, (John Bellamy Foster, 2022) or as applied within Chinese ecological Marxist context as expounded by Chen Xueming’s The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital (2017). Indeed, being the world leader in renewable energy capacity and production, China is potentially pathing a way to an global ecosocialist era, (David Schwartzman; and globaltimes 26/9/23) in a global community with a shared future within an ecological sustainable and harmonious coexistence with planet earth.
Outside the English-speaking world, Michael Löwy has done important ecological environmental studies in France, Daniel Tanuro in Belgium, Christian Stache in Germany, Saito and Ryuji Sasaki in Japan, Martínez-Alier and Carles Soriano in Spain, Ricardo Dobrovolski in Brazil, Eduardo Gudynas in Uruguay, and Vishwas Satgar in South Africa.
An important ecosocialist website is Climate and Capitalism, edited by Ian Angus.
As what Huang Shifang once stated on a national rejuvenation process What can Chinese Modernization bring to Global Development and China-Malaysian Cooperation? - required are not the tools and techniques of neoliberalism policies, but the applications of effective ecological endeavour, too, otherwise a nation state shall have ecological disasters like the Melaka Gateway and Lynas rare-earth extractions with environmental and health degradations; see also Raub gold mining and Malmut copper mining. Even worst, the wholesale financialisation capitalism of natural capital - expounded by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology - there is capitalist economic valorization of nature as exemplified by the state economy of Sabah in a carbon-exchange deal with a Global North monopoly-capital.
RELATED READINGS
Wang Yi, Sept 2022 Global Development Initiative
World Bank, 2022, Learn from China’s Experience
csloh, Sept 2023, Geoeconomics Challenges for MADANI economy