In September, China has for the first time outnumbered Italy as to gross domestic product, causing us to lose the sixth placing worldwide, which we had occupied for many years. If we take into account that the People’s Republic has one billion three hundred million inhabitants versus our fifty-six million, it is not such a sensational achievement: the per capita income continues to be one twentieth of ours.
The significant factor is, that since it effectively rejected communism, China has grown on average by 9.7% per year, and even in 2002, which is viewed as an unexceptional year in Peking, its growth rate will have been seven times higher than that of the European Union.
By continuing in this way, by 2010 it will also outnumber Great Britain, France and Germany and in 2020 it will outdo Japan, and start to chase the United States, provided that, during the course of the great modernisation process started by Deng Xiaoping and continued by his successors, nothing happens to mess up the situation. I have recently returned to China after an absence of approximately thirteen years, and I hardly recognised it: the Shanghai town centre now looks just like an American city, and Peking is changing as it prepares for the 2008 Olympic Games.

But the Chinese themselves immediately warned me: whatI was seeing was no. 1 China, which includes the capital and the seaboard and receives most foreign investments, which has busy relations with foreign countries and has now occidentalised in many respects.
But behind this glittering façade, are no. 2 China, made up by the central agricultural regions with their 600 million inhabitants, which means there no longer is sufficient land to be farmed, no. 3 China, the former Manchuria, peppered with obsolete heavy industry factories that only produce losses, and no. 4 China, the western highlands, where life often takes you back one hundred years.
Day by day, the gap between no. 1 China and the other three parts of the country increases, despite the Government’s efforts to insure that the budding (and often already impudent) welfare of the most developed regions spreads to the internal regions; and day by day the danger increases for this country, whose unity has always been unstable and in which local authorities are achieving increasing autonomy, to fall apart as it has happened with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
The only reason for this not having occurred yet is that China is ruled with an iron hand by a communist nomenklatura, which has accepted market economy but not the culture of freedom, which suppresses any dissidence, gags the press and orders 3000 death sentences each year.
Based on what the newspapers say, these fears may appear to be excessive; the media have announced that China è has been recently admitted into the World Trade Organization with everyone’s approval; that, after a few stormy exchanges regarding Taiwan and an accident in the Hainan air space, it has established, also thanks to the joint fight against Islamic terrorism, a good relationship with America and Bush; that its balance of payments is always positive, with two hundred billion dollars currency reserves. These are all positive events, which tend to reassure foreign enterprises, which have already invested 300 billion Euros and which continue to be attracted by the combination (now difficult to find in other parts of the world) of low salaries, industrious labour and no trade union obligations. But “all that glitters is not gold” (as the Italian proverb says). Behind the GDP triumphal march, we can perceive political, economical and social problems that “makes any veins and pulses tremble” (as Dante would say), problems for which not even the new rulers appear to have a solution. The chief one relates to the form of government, which was tabled ever since the now quite distant day on which Deng started his famous “four modernizations”.
How long will a Country that is in a state of ferment and whose most dynamic parts have now been conquered by market economy allow the sole party system that “proposes and disposes” everything to last? The recent history of eastern Asia teaches us that, when a dictatorship has completed its assignment in leading a Country from agricultural to industrial economy, it is exposed to the democracy virus: this had already occurred in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The Chinese Communist Party’s hegemony was first attached by the students in Tienanmen Square thirteen years ago and it put the revolt down with comparative ease, because the time was not yet ripe for a Liberal Democrat revolution. Possibly, time may not be even ripe now, but the intolerance for the current power structure is growing day by day, not only in no. 1 China, where it is regarded as anachronistic and inefficient, but also in no. 2 China, overburdened with taxes and the corruption of local authorities, in no. 3 China, where the progressive closing of large industrial areas is creating frightful social problems, and in no. 4 China, where ethnic minorities are becoming less submissive. Even though they have never known democracy, over the last ten years the Chinese have become much more intolerant of power abuse and injustice, and rebellions (even of a violent nature) are now an everyday occurrence. For instance, the story of the huge dam on the Yang Tsekiang downstream from Yaowan, which, once completed, will oblige as many as 1.2 million people to abandon their homes, is surrounded by a number of local jacqueries which have seriously alarmed the Peking authorities. Often these rebellions, which are never reported by State media, become known to western observers weeks later, when it is therefore difficult to establish their actual extent. In most cases, they are not meant to fight the central government, which in the Chinese provinces has always been regarded as a distant entity, but local small- or medium-sized party tyrants, imposing tolls, demanding kickbacks, not supplying services and not ashamed of showing off, under the eyes of their victims, a welfare that can only result from their illicit gains. The most explosive situation can be found today in no. 2 China, whose six hundred million inhabitants are threatened by one of the greatest unemployment crises in the history of mankind. Every year Chinese agriculture, which until not long ago represented the spine of economy, is forced to get rid of 4 to 6 million labourers, who tend to pour into the towns and into the most flourishing coastal areas, in search of any job. This migratory mass continues to grow, and will become uncontrollable when the opening of frontiers imposed by the WTO rules will exclude from the market a range of produces. The Worldwide Bank reckons that, in order to face the agricultural crisis, the Chinese government will have to create at least nine million new jobs each year in the industry and services sectors, versus the approximate six million per year in the twenty-year period of the great boom. Should this not be possible, Chinese towns, which are already chaotic in themselves, would be faced with an uncontrollable third-world type disbandment, with the growth within the precinct of favelas or shantytowns, like in Rio, Johannesburg, Karachi or Jakarta. Taking into account the fact that, as of today, they still lack the required services, as well as energy and water supplies, only a few would be able to take it on the chin.
The point is that the transition from control economy to market economy has been dragging on for years, and the Government has not yet been able to undo the most tangled knots. The State’s presence in industry, and above all in finance, is still extremely high, and leads to all sorts of tangled conflicts of interest.
For instance, the strong bonds between the banking system and political power have resulted in the bad debts reported by the major banks amounting to 30, 40 and even 50 per cent of their total credits, which means that, from the western system point of view, they should be regarded as bankrupt. In the eyes of external observers, the whole Chinese economic system sometimes appears to be like a house of cards, which may undergo a headlong fall should anything not turn out as hoped for. What makes it even more fragile is the existence of organised and expanded criminality, which often gets to seize power and take over whole towns, plots fraudulent financial schemes that would make Sindona envious and gets to corrupt million of larger or smaller civil servants.
When they mange to find them out, authorities are certainly not too fussy about the matter and indeed most death sentences are inflicted for so-called financial crimes. But for each one person who is caught in the net of such a faltering justice, one hundred manage to get away with it. The latest business devised by criminality has been that of managing the production of “alternative” pharmaceutical products to those supplied by the State, which may occasionally fill the gap left by public healthcare deficiencies, but which, only last year (according to figures which we are by the way unable to check) are said to have killed 192,000 people. The Chinese government appears to be somehow conscious of these dangers and is trying to prevent them. For instance, a project was started a few years ago to build in the internal provinces, which are most threatened by the agricultural crisis, new urban centres, to host the farm workers driven out by the market, transfer from the coast the “ripest” productions and create new industrial poles. In some cases, especially where some sort of industrial tradition existed, this scheme has succeeded, whereas in others it has only created expensive white elephants, where foreign investors refuse to settle for geographic or logistic reasons and the “migrants” themselves are by no means interested in stopping. Recently, after years of ostrich policy, the authorities have brought themselves to also face the AIDS epidemics, which is spreading like wildfire, a rather surprising fact for a an authoritative and moralist country such as China: six million people infected as of today, and possibly 20 million by 2010. A research study has even forecasted 12 million deaths in 10 years’ time. The disease of our time has chiefly reached China through the southwest border from Burma, great producer of drug, by first hitting the ethnic monitories inhabiting the border provinces and then spreading to the rest of the country. Faced with the possibility that Chine may turn out to be a giant with feet of clay, and that, overcome by all these problems, it may sink into chaos, (thus clipping the wings of the only great economy that is still in good health), western governments appear to be more interested in working towards the stability of the regime than in encouraging the democratisation process. The possibility that China may one day take up the position of the “great enemy”, which was once occupied by USSR, is still referred to in conferences, but it does not represent at the moment a key factor as far as major political choices are concerned. Americans have practically stopped taking an interest in the destiny of dissidents and, in order to obtain China’s cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda, have even accepted to include in the list of terrorist organisations a Sinkiang Islamic movement, which had till then been viewed as a freedom fighter. Regarding Taiwan, some kind of tacit compromise has been reached by the two parties, whereby the Chinese government has stopped threatening the island in terms of military attacks and Washington is doing its best to discourage the Taipeh independence ambitions. A confrontation that still exists relates to the Chinese supplies of military technology, especially as far as missilery is concerned, to those which the American had defined as “rascal countries”. At least from a government point of view, Europe’s position does not differ in this Realpolitik approach. In competition with each other, so as to ensure for themselves a share in the huge Chinese market, the European countries are handling the Peking government with kid gloves, and they shy away from irritating it with too many reminders as to the respect of human rights or spectacular audiences for the Dalai Lama. The left-wing, which constantly attacks America with regards to death penalties, is chastely silent as to the fact that China, on its own, is responsible for 80% of death sentences executed worldwide. It seems as if Mao’s successors were granted, in view of their history, some sort of licence to kill. As far as the Chinese Government is concerned, it exploits this situation as much as it can: when it suits it, it puts its foot down (as in the case of the Security Council’s resolution on Iraq), but it shies away from being too inflexible, because it is aware that a deterioration in its relationship with the West in general and with America in particular would prove disastrous from an economic point of view. However, it does not wave any of its options mor any of its rights, whilst it continues to strengthen its military power. The American political commentator Paul Kennedy has said that, despite all our efforts, we have not yet understood China at all, and, as a result of this, we are neither able to tell what sort of China we want, nor have we any chance of influencing the course of events. We are therefore witnessing, with a mixture of fascination, anxiety and resignation, an intricate and turbulent transformation process, whose outcome continues to be shrouded in mist. translated by Interpres