Another, quite long, advantaged (page A 15) piece on China in the WSJ that forces a class analysis on a behavioral change, and, thereby, misses what is likely to happen.
Mr. Guy Sorman tells us what he sees, having spent all of 2005 and part of 2006, traveling throughout China. The generally favorable Western press misses: Overwhelming corruption, poverty, isolation, and disaffection of the 1 billion strong peasantry. Villages where at least 80% of the families are affected by AIDS, and are without proper medical care. Teachers who can read and write, but not much more. Two hundred million peasants from the villages looking for work in the growing urban slums. A one child policy that has enraged the peasant. Unemployment closer to 20% than the official 3.5%. A class of “parvenus,” newly established workers for enterprises owned and directed by the Communist Party. He tells us that there is no guarantee that the 1 billion he finds will ever integrate with the parvenus in a modern China. It is just as likely that the peasant will remain forever out of modernity. Lacking political rights the peasantry cannot force the ruling bureaucracy to an accounting.
He introduces us to an official who criticizes Mr. Sorman for a lack of confidence in the Party’s ability to solve problems. Mr. Sorman agrees; he has no such confidence.
Now, a behavioral analysis must begin with the billion peasants, not on the consumption side as Mr. Sorman teats the issue, but the production side. Obviously a population that large cannot rely on a few hundred thousand bureaucrats to give them an adequate standard of living, adequate medical care, or a productive educational system. The peasantry has to do it itself. There is only one starting point to begin the transformation: a school system. The “West” has been reading for 500 years, the Chinese peasantry has been in a school system for less than 70 years. Whether the annual growth rate is 8% or 10%, in truth except for Japan and Korea, no one has seen such a rapid change for such an enormous population. This change is a tribute to the intelligence of the Chinese once they are in a school system, no matter how impoverished. A behavioral analysis would predict the amazing growth rate given just two data points: information that a school system has been instituted, and Chinese IQ scores.
The difference between Mr. Sorman’s skepticism, and my position about the trajectory of the Chinese economy, and the Chinese nuclear weapons program, revolve around Chinese IQ scores.
Nuclear weapons are, fundamentally, talent, IQ scores made visible. Mr. Sorman’s division of the Chinese population into two categories: the parvenus and the peasantry, invites an analysis that would place the toiling villagers into the categories “Invisible” and “Impotent.” But the teacher in that poverty stricken isolated village knows when An Wang shows up. They have tests, and the boy that can help the Chinese keep pace with the blonds in the death business begins to become visible, like his Slavic 15 year old counterpart, two generations ago. The blond problem is not the best algebra student selected out two hundred million, but the best algebra students out of over a thousand million people, one-fifth of the human race. The blonds cannot force the Chinese to be infinitely vulnerable, while the blonds remain infinitely safe.
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