March Madness
March 2nd, 2009 by Kent KedlJulius Caesar was told “beware the Ides of March”. If someone told me the same thing, I would be toast – I don’t know when the Ides of March is. My keen powers of deductive reasoning tell me that the Ides of March was some time in the month of March. And the month of March was not a good month for Big Julie so I am taking no chances. I am keeping my eyes open, my face to the wind and my asbestos underwear on (sure, it itches, but whose bum will stay rare in a fire, huh? … huh?!).
March is when things start to heat up in China – both literally and metaphorically – and there are a couple of things we are going to want to keep an eye on in the coming weeks. The biggie, of course, is the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress that starts this Thursday. Signs have been up for some weeks now around Shanghai, touting the accomplishments of the Party and the advances of the nation and the Chinese people under their leadership. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were running for something.
Well, in fact, they are. You see, just because there are no elections, doesn’t mean that the government is not, to some extent, “of the people, by the people and for the people”. As I have said in these pages before, the Chinese government and the Party – one in the same thing – know that, in today’s modern tell-all era of instant electronic communication, there are plenty of ways that they can be embarrassed in the eyes of the world. And that is a BIG no-no as far as they are concerned.
So besides the herd of 60+ year old men in bad suits and comb-overs rubber-stamping as if their life depended on it (and it does), we can also monitor the NPC meeting for some other details. The biggest issue will be how focused the Party will be on “social investment” in their economic stimulus program. In the past, most of the government’s investment has been in “big iron” projects – infrastructure (highways and railways) and energy (the Yangzi river dam, big mining projects). But now that China can claim more roads and rail than the U.S., it is time to move on to the next Big Thing. And that is investing in people: hospitals, healthcare, schools, job re-training and the like.
The current investment proposal allocates 1% of the stimulus to health care and education spending and 7% to public housing … not exactly numbers to warm the potentially frigid feelings of the populace. So I am looking for some other announcements to come out; some big Hallmark card of a program to send out the love.
The Party has been doing a decent job of maintaining their street cred: from the Olympics to a pretty rapid response to the tragic earthquakes last year when Wen Jia-bao showed up to provide a much-appreciated compassionate face to an otherwise distant bureaucracy. But it is difficult to send Grandpa Wen to every displaced worker to insure them that everything is being done to help them find another job; to visit every white collar worker to show them that its OK to spend some of their savings now because a social safety net is being built to help care for them and their parents in their old age.
Just like any other country in the world, China is going to need to speak words of comfort to their own people in these troubled times. The NPC meeting this week and the subsequent economic stimulus package will be the next voice we hear.
