Intra-China dwarfs China-world
■"Rural Exodus for Work Fractures Chinese Family: The Great Divide (A Missing Generation)," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 21 December 2004, p. A1.
This is another point I tried to get across last night in response to a caller's question: I think most analysts tend to overestimate the nature and extent of China's internal political adjustment (i.e., the rule of the party) to its growing connectivity to the global economy in relation to the internal social and economic adjustment that continues to unfold in response to the far larger process of integration and growing connectivity within China. In short, China's internal integration process will dwarf that of its external integration process.
What this article highlights is the amazing amount of internal migration going on across China today, as fathers and sometimes even both parents leave behind families in search of better-paying jobs. The impact of all those absentee parents will be profound for an entire generation of Chinese kids. You simply won't have the same family-centric China in twenty years ago that you have today, and it's hard to exaggerate what a huge social change that will be for this culture.
This is yet another reason why I argue that America needs to mentor China in this grand historic emergence process as much as possible, but most clearly in terms of its security interactions with the outside world. In short, we need to make China our strategic security partner not to make ourselves feel safe, but to make China feel safe, and—in doing so—help this vast civilization traverse a vast amount of economic and social history in a very short time.
Remember, the question of who loses China today is really the question of who loses this era's version of globalization.