*
The tales making the rounds in Shanghai and Shenzhen were reminiscent of Wall Street in 1929. Chinese financial markets had crashed ten percent in one week following an already huge twenty percent over the previous six weeks.
Some had been comforted by the government’s measures to stabilise the stock market, but July 27, signalled the start of a new rout with the Shanghai Composite falling a huge 8.47%. It was the greatest fall since the crash of 2007-2008, when over a twelve month period, that is from October 1, 2007, to October 1, 2008, the index fell from 5954 points to 1728.
Many had feared 2008 was the precursor of another depression. It was not. The same fears were being voiced about China and in the same way they were exaggerated, which did not mean that all would escape unscathed, those who had bet their life savings on the hope of an eternal rise in the prices of homes would certainly be hurt. As the hackneyed Wall Street saying went: a sucker was born everyday, though in China it would have to be changed to a hundred thousand.
Nevertheless, the crash was an indicator of the state of health of the world’s second largest economy. Beijing had been caught unaware and was scrambling to rein in the market forces it had inadvertently unleashed. It was evident that the stock market downturn reflected a wider economic trend and future growth would certainly be less spectacular, a situation which would have repercussions on property, construction and infrastructure.
The real problem was that of excess capacity and a mountain of bad debt, there were many similarities with the pre-2008 situation in the West, which posed questions about the solidity of China’s financial institutions and fuelled the fear of a hard landing.
This was reflected in the brutal fall of commodity prices, which would hit commodity based economies starting with Russia followed by Australia, Chile and South Africa.
China had a voracious appetite for energy and raw materials, consuming vast quantities of oil, coal, copper and iron ore from Australia, Chile, South Africa, the Middle East and Russia. Every single day, huge ships - just two or three of which could carry the equivalent of all the goods transported by all nations over all the world’s seas in the days of Captain Cook - discharged their cargoes at Chinese ports, highlighting the interdependence and fragility of the world’s economies.
CHINA’S PACIFIC EMPIRE
Where the Andes dropped into the Amazon rainforests of Caqueta Province, over one thousand Chinese engineers and workers were building a hydro-electric dam that destined to provide sufficient power for almost a quarter of the country’s needs.
Wherever Tom Barton travelled in Colombia, or its neighbours, he witnessed evidence of a vast Chinese plan to extend its influence and presence along the Pacific façade of the South American continent. Once regarded as the chasse gardée of Washington, Chinese interests were making their mark on the continent at lightening speed.
Barton was quick to see how his links to China could be of use, as projects from Chile to Honduras for sea ports, canals, refineries, dams, roads, railways and bridges were being planned and financed by Chinese banks and built by Chinese engineers.
South American leaders hailed Chinese investment and flattered Beijing’s leaders for their interest in the development of their respective countries. For a century North Americans had scorned the world that lay beyond their southern border: underdeveloped, unstable, dangerous and at best an export markets for American manufactured goods within the protectionist framework of Washington’s policies.
Washington had not measured the transformation of Central and South America as the consumer society reached every corner of the continent. As for the region’s leaders they realised consumerism replied better to their citizens needs than revolution and Marxism, as globalisation and Cornucopia reached out to every town and village thanks to introduction of modern logistics and technology.
Chinese credit oiled the mechanism of exchange, not only satisfying the needs of governments and consumers across the planet, but also that of China’s industrialists and workers.
Beijing was accused of imperialism as its companies acquired mineral rights and market shares, the same companies were accused of environmental and worker abuse, but it was no worse than that which US businesses had practised for as long as the gringos had meddled in Latin American affairs, fomenting revolt whenever it suited them, including the Putin style putsch that led to the secession of Panama from Colombia a century before.
Rafael Correa, President of neighbouring Ecuador, was a persistent critic of Washington’s policies towards his own and other Latin American countries. Coming from a modest mestizo background he was not endeared to the US, which he held responsible for his father’s suffering and death after being imprisoned for drug smuggling.
Correa had refused to renew the US lease on a base at Manta on the Pacific coast saying: ‘We can negotiate with the United States over a base in Manta if they let us put a military base in Miami.’ He once joked that Hugo Chávez’s comparison of George Bush to Satan was disrespectful of the devil.
Like many others, if not all Latin American countries, Ecuador had been held on a tight leash by the US, through the IMF and the World Bank. Bankrupt in 1999, the country struggled to recover and when China appeared in 2010, in the form of the China Development Bank, with money and promises, Ecuador had not hesitated to seize the opportunity.
Correa viewed the presence of China as a diversification of his country’s foreign relations policy, rather than a substitute for the US. However, Ecuador, as an oil producer, be it modest, saw the bulk of its petroleum exports, representing nearly half of its revenues, go to China through PetroChina and Sinopec, both state-controlled Chinese companies.
The risk in Barton’s eyes was the loss of control of natural resources if the conditions of the contracted debts could not be met, giving China the leverage to demand further concessions. Meaning producers of oil, minerals and other natural resources risked being drawn into loan-shark style deals.
Barton had often witnessed Chinese business methods, how they cajoled visiting delegations, offering them luxury hotels, tourist trips, banquets and karaoke evenings where alcohol flowed and girls abounded.
The greatest risk however, was to China itself. If the Chinese government was forced to draw back, then South American states and companies would find themselves stranded high and dry with a mountain of unfinished projects. And there was every reason to think this could happen if China was forced to concentrate its resources on its problems at home: falling growth and labour demand with hundreds of millions of Chinese workers and peasants caught in a poverty trap. This together with an aging population and a ‘one family one child’ society threatened the future of China and its magnanimity towards developing economies.
JOURNALIST TURNED WRITER
“Liam, if you think I’m as rich as J.K.Rowlings, then you’re mistaken,”O’Connelly told the young banker.”
“But you’re not poor.”
“Sure, it’s a fact I’ve got a few millions, but Rowlings is mega rich. Most writers as as poor as door mice. Remember I’m a journalist, I started at the New York Times after graduating.”
“What did you study?”
“Journalism. I also studied languages and have an MBA,” replied O’Connelly without thinking.
“That helps.”
“Yes, I suppose being a journalist I was lucky enough to have the contacts. If I have any advice to budding writers, it’s to have another profession where they can earn enough money to live, then the rest is all bonus, if they hit the jackpot then they can retire from their job and enjoy writing.”
“I’ll remember that. What about piracy?”
“What about it? Personally I don’t think it makes that much difference, the kind of people that download stuff on Internet aren’t the kind of people that would buy a book, or a film, at least not many of them. I don’t see why books and films more than a couple of years old are not available free, they are in public libraries.”
> “That’s pretty much against industry thinking.”
“Maybe. Today what counts is something new, that lasts about a year, then getting it into a film or TV production, another couple of years. After that forget it.”
“Do you think society is as bad as you see it in your books?”
O’Connelly laughed, it was a question he had asked himself many times.
Writers, whatever they wrote, reflected the society and the times in which they lived, and from whatever standpoint they represented. If their work reflected a dystopian society, it was because it was dystopian. For the majority of those who lived in the times of Charles Dickens or George Orwell their societies were dystopian. The fact that a few lived remarkably well did not compensate for those who lived in misery.
The proof was visible in the arrival of Corbyn, Tsipras and the leaders of Podemos, or at the other end of the political spectrum UKIP or the FN, on the forefront of the political scene, a consequence of the growing dysfunctionality of European society, where whole swaths of its population felt abandoned; men and women who saw their leaders as being out of touch, chasing skirts on scooters, building fortunes on the basis of the relations they built whilst in power, promoting the establishment elite by favouring old school pals, hobnobbing it with the stars, assuring sinecures for their retiring colleagues at the BBC, grabbing at jobs in government institutions in London, or the much maligned European Commission in Brussels.
The economic crisis that struck in 2008, had, instead of chastising those who had caused it, rewarded them. The victims: working and middle classes, who were punished with unemployment, falling incomes, lower savings interest rates and lower pensions.
At the same time the policies pursued by Western leaders, notably Bush and Blair, had led their nations into unwinnable and catastrophic wars, wars that were to tear the Middle East apart, causing death and chaos, creating dysfunctional states and waves of refugees not seen since the end of WWII: millions of innocent men, women and children fleeing the disintegration and destruction of their homelands.
The complexity of modern economies favoured a technocratic approach to government, bypassing democratic processes and in the process of doing so alienating citizens. As a consequence voters turned to extremism, forsaking mainstream parties in favour of populist movements, lured by unrealistic promises at the risk of fuelling even greater disillusionment and disaffection with the established political process.
“Bad, I don’t know, but unpredictable yes,” O’onnelly said. “The twists and turns that lay ahead make fiction appear look tame. The world is certainly a dangerous place.”
Vladimir Putin, who certainly had his own problems, must have smiled behind his hand when he saw Corbyn demanding the UK quit the EU and NATO; that London abandon its nuclear deterrent; when chaos threatened Athens; when Central Europe was invaded by waves of refugees fleeing the war in Syria; when Italy was flooded with economic migrants from Libya and Black Africa; when François Hollande dithered over the delivery of warships to Moscow naively wading into the Syrian imbroglio.
As globalisation accelerated and technical change transformed society, it was difficult for O’Connelly not to see the world in pessimistic terms. Vast waves of immigration, precursors of worse to come, could no longer be accepted as beneficial or perceived as a fraternal obligation.
Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic vision of the future in his novel The Camp of the Saints (1973) was visionary. At the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem; the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman; only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia; and Switzerland, resisting international pressure to open its frontiers, is relegated to the status of a rogue state.
The turmoil in the Middle East highlighted the existence of large numbers of Muslims in Europe as thousands of young men volunteered to join ISIS. What happen when the war finally came to an end, with its lot of embittered, hardened, losers returning home, was left to the imagination.
If Pat O’Connelly, as a young man, had been presented with such a scenario for the future, he would have seen it as a preposterous flight of political fantasy, pure imaginative fiction, though Gore Vidal’s Messiah, written in 1954, had made a deep impression on his young mind with the writer’s story of a strange world divided by Cavism and Islam.
GRAND LARCENY
If any proof was needed to show the world was moving in reverse it was a new yacht ordered by the oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, baptised Sailing Yacht A, which as its name suggests would be a sailing yacht, the largest of its kind. It would be his second yacht, the oligarch was already owner of Motor Yacht A.
The rich spent nearly three billion dollars a year on their floating palaces. Over four thousand super-yachts sailed the seas, the larger vessels venturing to the Galapagos Islands and even polar regions. The label super-yacht designated those measuring more than thirty metres long, such as the late Michael Fitzwilliams’ Marie Gallant II, which had measured nearly fifty metres from prow to stern, small compared to Tarasov’s mega eighty metre Cleopatra, which in turn was dwarfed by his compatriot Roman Abramovich’s Eclipse one hundred and sixty metres long vessel.
Andrey Melnichenko’s Motor Yacht A
How, in the twenty plus years since Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union, could certain Russians have accumulated do much wealth? Given the USSR had been a Communist State before Gorbachev’s momentous decision, where all was owned by the people for the people.
At that time Russia could not be compared to modern day China; it was bankrupt and would take another ten years to start its recovery from Communism’s ruinous legacy. Its industries in an advanced state of dilapidation; forty percent of its population had been lost with the independence of Ukraine, Belarus and its central Asia republics; and if that was not enough it had lost its captive satellites to the West: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the DDR and the Baltic States.
Yet men like Melnichenko and Abramovich had become rich beyond all imagination. How?
Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth belonged to its princes and a small well cared for population. American billionaires were self-made men or those who had inherited wealth made over generations in the world richest and most powerful capitalist nation. On the other hand Russia’s oligarchs reigned over a nation where the vast majority of its citizens lived a dismal existence, some in conditions of near misery, little changed since the time of Joseph Stalin, or even the czars.
For Russia’s middle classes Putin’s latest decisions were an unexpected turn of the screw. Seventy percent of all Russians earned less than seven thousand dollars a year … that is before the rouble lost half of its value. With that kind of income an average working family with two children could not expect to buy a car, or at least a modern car, and was excluded from owning electronic consumer goods like smart phones, flat screen TVs or laptops, not to mention foreign holidays.
The Russian middle classes were significantly poorer off than those in Western Europe and incomparably worse off than their American counterparts. As to the working classes, fifty percent of the population, they had to manage on less than five thousand dollars a year.
The hardest hit of all were those whose incomes fell below the poverty line, the numbers of which had risen significantly according to Rosstat, the official statistics agency, a consequence of rising living costs. Worse, the World Bank forecast more pain to come as public sector salaries stagnated, pensions fell and benefits dwindled.
The question begged as to how an oligarch could pay four hundred million dollar for a yacht when the Russian people were plunged into the severest economic crisis since the dissolution. Built in Germany by Blohm + Voss, and designed by Frenchman, Philippe Starck, Sailing Yacht A could accommodate twenty passengers and a crew of more than fifty. On completion the eight deck 144 metres long vessel would weigh over fourteen t
housand tonnes, capable of a cutting through the waves at forty kilometres an hour.
The equality promised by seventy years of Communism had vanished in a befuddled whimper with the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the CIS in December 1991. Gorbachev’s resignation on December 26, would have left Lenin and his revolutionary comrades wringing their hands in despair. Their great adventure had brought the Russian people nothing. In the words of Gorbachev:
We had a lot of everything - land, oil and gas, other natural resources - and there was intellect and talent in abundance. However, we were living much worse than people in the industrialized countries were living and we were increasingly lagging behind them. The reason was obvious even then. This country was suffocating in the shackles of the bureaucratic command system. Doomed to cater to ideology, and suffer and carry the onerous burden of the arms race, it found itself at the breaking point.
Seven decades of revolution, civil war, bloodshed and suffering had spawned a new autocrat and a new form of aristocracy; a nobility that served the Kremlin, constituted by the well paid upper middle classes: entrepreneurs, managers, engineers and specialists.
In one hundred years Russian had turned a full circle and in many ways was poorer than the empire Nikolai II had ruled, since it now depended almost entirely on its exports of oil and gas to survive.
Melnichenko and Abramovich were not the only Russians with a megalomaniac taste for extravagance. In spite of Russia’s crisis, Vasily Klyukin, one of Sergei Tarasov’s competitors, had just announced his intention to buy a super-yacht equipped with a helipad and helicopter.
They were members of their country’s new aristocracy, the hundred or so oligarchs who controlled one third of Russia’s economy. However, they lived in fear of the autocrat and if any proof was needed Abramovich’s Eclipse was fitted with a missile defence system worthy of a James Bond blockbuster.
AN IMPENETRABLE VEIL
The realization that the impenetrable veil that separated the world from the workings of the Chinese government would never be lifted came when Lao Wu whispered to Pat, things had been clearer in Mao’s time, when one man was in control, even if his close followers had fought each other with drawn daggers.
Four decades after Mao joined the Pantheon of Communist deities, China was ruled by faceless forms that moved across the stage in a shadow show, expressionless ciphers, their roles ambiguous, their decision making process opaque, their objectives ambivalent. Like Cixi they ruled over China’s vast masses from behind curtains, without any visible reaction to the every day events and concerns that impacted the Chinese people.
Perhaps that was fine when things went well, but who was answerable to the people when things went wrong, who was really at the helm?
Lao Wu’s story of China’s phenomenal growth, which was on average a mite under ten percent a year from 1989 to 2016, and continued to hover at around the seven percent mark … at least according to government statistics, were a reminder of the extraordinary changes that had taken place.
“Just look at Shenzhen,” he told Pat.
The city had grown from a village into a vast metropolis in less than four decades with its population growing from thirty thousand to an unbelievable twelve million and more.
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