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Wholehearted embrace of market forces contradicts claims of social objectives
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LAST week I was asked by a friend to recommend some magazines on international trade. As I am unacquainted with the sector, I turned to a veteran business reporter. He, too, seemed at a loss.
Admittedly China has become a phenomenal exporter and importer, and its sustained trade balance (deemed “favorable” in standard textbooks) has earned China a huge amount of forex reserves, which then translate into holdings in US Treasury bills.
How do our policy makers feel sitting atop this rising pile?
How does this pile correlate with the soaring inflation and living costs we have been seeing in the past decade?
These should have been important questions — but with deep regret, the reporter said that, notwithstanding our growing trade volume, with enshrined market forces becoming the real driver of business and trade, purely theoretical inquiries have become more and more irrelevant.
In a sense, today’s trade is driven more by capital and the market than theoretical explorations. As a matter of fact, many trade magazines and cultural entities are struggling to justify their very existence on the market.
In last Thursday’s Oriental Morning Post, Qian Liqun, professor of Chinese at the Peking University, recalled some thought-provoking remarks made by late scholar Wang Yao, who used to be Qian’s supervisor. Wang summed up zhishi fenzi (the intelligentsia) as comprised of two parts, zhishi, knowledge, meaning one must first of all have knowledge, and fenzi, literally discrete units, meaning a true intelligentsia must be independent. “Without independence, whatever knowledge acquired is liable to be corrupted,” Wang reportedly said.
Today only those intellectuals who have mastered the art of endearing themselves to power and the market have the best chance of being heard.
We know that university deans and other college cadres enjoy administrative degrees that can be strictly calibrated in the official hierarchy.
Thus, we heard a story about several professors contending for a chuji cadre position (a modest yet standard official degree guaranteeing standard perks and prestige). What’s less known is that even the head of a public kindergarten has a standard administrative rank.
For intellectuals lacking the wherewithal to find a niche in hotly contested officialdom, the enshrinement of market forces affords them another way to prostitute their talents in service of the market. We have heard repeated assurances from those on high and some scholars that “the market knows the best.” The market not only knows best about business, but also about culture.
This March it was reported that the 80-year-old Shanghai Concert Hall, quite a landmark (culturally and otherwise), was officially rechristened Sennheiser Shanghai Concert Hall.
Chen Gang, a well-known composer who performed there many times, blogged, “At last, the only concert hall named ‘Shanghai’ has successfully given up its time-honored title and been adopted by a German businessman.”
For your information, Sennheiser makes headphones and microphones.
Cultural landmarks
Chen bemoaned the fact that we are losing bit by bit those familiar cultural landmarks. Think how many cultural entities still manage to retain the unadulterated “Shanghai” in their names.
He urged the government to step in and provide support in case these entities are in financial straits.
Well, our government might be flush with money, but apparently the priority today is how to make these cultural entities more responsive to the market. For all our protestations of belief in social objectives, our wholehearted embrace of market fundamentalism ought to be surprising.
In Greg Cusack’s review of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (“Extreme wealth in very few hands undermines fair and just society,” May 9, Shanghai Daily) he mentioned the concentration of social wealth in the US, citing the prediction that by the end of the century the richest 10 percent in America will control 80-90 percent of national wealth.
In more senses than one, this best-selling work is but a recap of Marxist tenets, which have inspired successive generations of Chinese revolutionaries.
As Marx observed, once capitalism was born, in light of capital’s inherent tendency to appreciate, it simply must turn global human consumption needs into its market, and regard global natural resources as materials aiding this appreciation. It must involve all non-European peoples in the operation of capital, thus heralding the start of world history in the real sense of the term.
Ironically, in the capitalist age, even Marxist tenets cannot escape the clutches of capital. The publisher Lawrence & Wishart (L&W) recently issued a takedown notice to the operators of the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA, http://www.marxists.org), demanding them to delete the online version of the copyrighted volumes of the “Marx-Engels Collected Works,” a 50-volume hardcovers distributed by L&W. What would Marx, the self-proclaimed gravedigger of capitalism, have said? “I told you so!”?
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