Re: [Marxism] Exaggerating Chinese economic power

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

While the contrasting opinions of the Washington Post's John Pomfret and of
Fidel are worthy of consideration, the best guage of China's relative
standing and influence is how the matter is viewed by the international
bourgeoisie - the heads of global corporations, central bankers, large
institutional investors, politicians, and their strategists - whose wealth
and power is directly tied to the reliability of their assessments.

By this yardstick, Chinese economic power - measured in terms of its rapid
ascent as both a buyer and lender of last resort - would hardly appear to be
exaggerated. Not for nothing has world capitalism's paramount
representative, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and his predecessors made
repeated pilgrimages to China to develop a"strategic economic dialogue" with
that country.  Most economic planning at the top today turns on China's huge
capital reserves and continued purchase of US, European, and Japanese
securities, it's provision of low-cost goods to firms and households in the
developed countries, it's emergence as the fastest-growing market for their
exports, and the new opportunities for expansion it presents to their banks
and manufacturers.

China will experience all of the cyclical and other stresses which afflict
capitalist economies, but I'd look first for evidence that that the big
bourgeoisie is discounting its secular importance in the world economy
before attaching too much weight to the opinion of Pomfret and other
naysayers.






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