Two years ago I was travelling in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and we passed a former village, quickly abandoned by now. And basically the grass(?) was torn apart and the water was polluted, and it was no longer liveable. I asked my guide, a Mongolian ecologist, what happened to the village. He told me why the village was abandoned. What happened was, gold mining. Gold was discovered underground of the village about in the early 50s. After some consideration, the villagers decided not to mine. Environmental destruction caused by gold mining would be too much to upset. They didn’t mine it for something like 30 years. In the 80s, China introduced market-oriented reform. In the villages, even though, under that title the land belonged to the village collectively. But we also enforced a semi-de facto privatization that provided land-use rights to each family, and each family decides what they want to do with the land. After the semi-privatization, a few families decided to mine the gold, but the community had no control of what the individual wanted to do. The mining families started to pollute the water, then basically everybody started to think, our community is ruined anyway, we ought to try to get some gold before it is totally ruined. So basically they enjoyed short term prosperity, but the village was ultimately ruined.

China is the darling of the World Bank model. GDP has been growing at 9 percent per year for the last 30 years. The top 5 or 10 percent of Chinese have basically joined the world middle class, and enjoy western consumerist lifestyles. But that is only one side of the story. That is what we normally hear from the media about what a successful story of China. We don’t really hear the other side. The majority of the people really suffer economic, environmental and social destruction. For example, inside Shin Province, the local people told me that thirty years ago the county has more than 230 elementary schools, and every village had an elementary school. Today, it only has less than 80. And many children, especially girls, are dropping out. They told me that the current generation has much more illiteracy, especially among girls, compared to the generation that grew up 30 years ago. That’s the real cost of China’s so called economic miracle.

It’s not only that China that has …(?) its natural resources. We all know that China has become the so called world factory, but it more accurately producing for the world, while its working class has actually become the slave of the world, but in order to supply this factory, China has not only obliterated its only resources, it also has to buy more and more resources from other developing countries. For example, lots of wood processing factories in China are driving the clear-cutting in Indonesia or Malaysia. When we talk about resource consumption, including energy and raw materials, you can say China needs to be blamed for the paths it has taken. We also need to look at the big picture, because China is the kitchen, while the West, especially the US and Europe is the dinner table. We clearly need to challenge this whole model. Even now in China, people are waking up, especially at the grassroots level, among the peasants and workers. People are saying ‘their GDP is growing, but our livelihood is deteriorating.’ We need to challenge some of our basic measurements, basic assumptions about how to measure our wellbeing.

I grew up in China. The first ten years of my life, I lived off of two dollars a day. That’s different, because that was a life with out much luxury, but it was a life with sufficiency and dignity. To this Chinese, living at 2 dollars a day is misery, because so many more aspects of life have been monetized and has been materialized, and their basic needs can no longer be met. Even so, back then, even though it was not a perfect model, it provided for majority of people the basic education, health care, housing, clothing etc. Today there is a growing gap. The unique Chinese have joined the global middle class, but the majority of the Chinese are sliding back into the third world. The slogan of the World Social Forum is ‘another model is possible.’ For us Chinese who experienced a different model 30 or 40 years ago, we know another world is possible, because it existed not so long ago, although it was not perfect. Overall the earlier model was better than what we have now.

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The speeches from Regaining Control of the Commons: WSF 2007 are provided for information and educational purposes. The transcription has been undertaken on a volunteer basis. Due to resource limitations we are unable to provide a complete transcription. We apologise for the breaks in the text.

Disclaimer: The view in this and the other articles do not (neccessarily) represent the position or views of Friends of the Earth Australia nor Friends of the Earth International.