Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

link between Shanghai and Beijing and a link into Tibet. The

Olympic Games are prompting heavy investment in Beijing.

‘China is also trying to build an interstate highway system more

extensive than America’s in just 

fifteen years, while practically

every large city is building or has just completed a big new airport.’

At last count, China had ‘more than 15,000 highway projects in the

works, which will add 162,000 kilometers of road to the country,

enough to circle the planet at the equator four times’.

17

 This e

ffort

is far larger 

in toto than that which the United States undertook

during the 1950s and 1960s in constructing the interstate highway

system, and has the potential to absorb surpluses of capital and

labour for several years to come. It is, however, de

ficit-financed (in

classic Keynesian style). It also entails high risks, since if the

investments do not return their value in due course, then a 

fiscal

crisis of the state will quickly ensue.

Rapid urbanization provides one way to absorb the massive

labour reserves that have converged on the cities from rural areas.

Dongguan, just north of Hong Kong, for example, has exploded

from a mere town to a city of 7 million inhabitants in a little over

twenty years. But ‘city o

fficials are not content with a 23 per cent

annual economic growth rate. They are putting the 

finishing

touches on a vast, entirely new annex city that they hope will draw

300,000 engineers and researchers, the vanguard of a new China’.

18

It is also the site of construction for what is slated to be the largest

shopping mall in the world (built by a Chinese billionaire, it has

seven zones modelled on Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt,

the Caribbean, and California, each constructed with such close

attention to detail as to be indistinguishable, we are told, from the

real thing).

Such new tier cities are locked in ferocious inter-urban competi-

tion. In the Pearl River delta, for example, each city is now trying

to capture as much business as possible ‘by outbuilding its neigh-

bors, often with duplicative results. Five international airports

were built in the late 1990s in a 100–kilometer radius, and a similar

boom is starting for ports and bridges’.

19

 Provinces and cities resist

Beijing’s e

fforts to rein in their investments, in part because they

have the power to fund their own projects by selling rights to

develop real estate.

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