International Law

Is China Going Green, Part XX? It Sure Isn't A Good Place For Kids.

By Dan

One of my best friends from college, (General Counsel for America at The Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, AND the author of a truly excellent book on the Negro Leagues) sent me a fascinating FT.com article this morning, entitled, "Japan Finds There is More to Life Than Growth," that poses the question as to whether Japan is the "most successful society in the world:

Is Japan the most successful society in the world? Even the question is likely (all right, designed) to provoke ridicule and have you spluttering over your breakfast. The very notion flies in the face of everything we have heard about Japan's economic stagnation, indebtedness and corporate decline.

Ask a Korean, Hong Kong or US businessman what they think of Japan, and nine out of 10 will shake their head in sorrow, offering the sort of mournful look normally reserved for Bangladeshi flood victims. 'It's so sad what has happened to that country,' one prominent Singaporean diplomat told me recently. 'They have just lost their way.'

The article argues that Japan has done well for its own people: 

Underlying much of the head-shaking about Japan are two assumptions. The first is that a successful economy is one in which foreign businesses find it easy to make money. By that yardstick Japan is a failure and post-war Iraq a glittering triumph. The second is that the purpose of a national economy is to outperform its peers.

If one starts from a different proposition, that the business of a state is to serve its own people, the picture looks rather different, even in the narrowest economic sense. Japan's real performance has been masked by deflation and a stagnant population. But look at real per capita income – what people in the country actually care about – and things are far less bleak.

By that measure, according to figures compiled by Paul Sheard, chief economist at Nomura, Japan has grown at an annual 0.3 per cent in the past five years. That may not sound like much. But the US is worse, with real per capita income rising 0.0 per cent over the same period. In the past decade, Japanese and US real per capita growth are evenly pegged, at 0.7 per cent a year. One has to go back 20 years for the US to do better – 1.4 per cent against 0.8 per cent. In Japan's two decades of misery, American wealth creation has outpaced that of Japan, but not by much.

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Patrick Smith, an expert on Asia, agrees that Japan is more of a model than a laggard. 'They have overcome the impulse – and this is something where the Chinese need to catch up – to westernise radically as a necessity of modernisation.' Japan, more than any other non-western advanced nation, has preserved its culture and rhythms of life, he says.

In just the last week, the following things have occurred that make me ask how China is really faring:

1. Friend came back from a one week visit to Shanghai with a respitory infection and told me that he gets one pretty much every time he goes to China, but nowhere else.
2. Two different sets of friends who have been living in China for years told me that they were going to be returning to the United States because they were tired of subjecting their young (ages 4-12) kids to the pollution and the toxins in the food.
3. Read probably my 100th article on how China's foods are so tainted by pollutants (this is separate from the 100 or so articles I have read about poisons in Chinese food, put there either intentionally to save money or negligently. 

I know it is wrong to compare a developed country like Japan (which has its own issues as well) to China, but, seriously, when is China actually going to start dealing with these things instead of just making pronouncements about how it will be going green?

Full post as published by China Law Blog on February 14, 2011 (boomark / email).