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China employs Georgia
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tolet tester. tHrabtth turr.cr.ioiney
I am a poor contemporary stand-in for
Paul Revere, but let me warn you anyway:
the Chinese are coming. Don't get me
wrong—it's not the Chinese people I'm
worried about; it's the Chinese-style politi
cal economy that they bring: brutal repres
sion in support of ruthless capitalism—the
worst of both worlds. A typical Chinese worker's
life, according to a recent on-site workplace investigation
by the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights (Google
it!): 80 cents an hour, 14-hour days, a seven-day work week,
sometimes 30 days in a row. Complainers are fired. Each worker
struggles alone; unions are forbidden at most factories. In
fact, attempting to organize a union free of party/state control
is essentially political dissent, as the corporations and the
Chinese state work hand-in-hand as a single entity vis-a-vis
the workers.
It's called "socialism with Chinese characteristics," which
is a little like calling getting beat up "a relaxing moment
with Mike Tyson characteristics." If you're one of the few left
who don't know how awful China is, Google "Chinese work
ing conditions and political repression"—while you still can.
Our eventual Chinese overlords don't much care for citizens
searching the Internet all willy-nilly. Before the company left
China, Google was regularly shut down in the country. But even
when it was up, it was tightly controlled. A search for, say,
"Tiananmen Square" would return no results. The 1989 student-
led democracy movement anchored in Tiananmen Square was
violently crushed by the Chinese State, with the Chinese
government's military waiting until night to fire ruthlessly on
some protesters and run tanks over others, killing as many as a
few thousand protesters asking for democracy.
You see, China has managed to decouple capitalism and
liberal democracy, which were believed by so many to be
codependent phenomena. Well, they're not, say the Chinese.
Capitalism can work just fine in less-than-democratic, even
actively repressive, regimes. In fact, Chinese capitalism is
outpacing our liberty-laden model by a long shot. And now the
experts are coming ashore to show us how it's done.
Thing is, they're not coming uninvited. Our Southern gov
ernors are all but laying out red carpet for the Chinese money
men and their political toughs. The Southern Governors'
Association, of which Nathan Deal is a member (as was Sonny
Perdue before him), regularly pals around with agents of the
brutal Chinese system.
The SGA website is telling. The group lists four areas of
work: Education, Energy and Environment, Health and Human
Services, and Economic Development, which could be subtitled
"Inviting the Chinese." While the Economic Development page
is full of photo galleries of Chinese visits, full-color booklets
(in Chinese) to download and videos about doing business in
the American South (again, for the Chinese), the other pages
are full of dead links. As of press time, every single link in
the non-economic development sections is dead, aside from a
random-ish list of individual governors' press releases. One can
only imagine that the SGA's priorities are reflected in its web
site management.
Announced at the top of each Southern state's page
in the downloadable booklet, just behind population and
available workers, is a key datum: whether or not the state
permits unionization. Even the Chinese know that "right to
work". (Google it!) means "ou: workers can't easily unionize."
With the Chinese so used to compliant workers back home,
it's our governors' way of accommodating our new friends.
Further down the list is information about the mountains of
tax revenue the states won't collect from Chinese corpora
tions, even though we can't afford to pay our teachers. Now,
that's Southern hospitality. Print it out and curl up with your
own copy. It's a fun read. It's even more fun, I imagine, if
you're a Chinese factory owner looking to break into the North
American market, and you're looking for a political environ
ment most similar to home.
Matthew Pulver
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8 FLAGPOLE.COM MAY 4, 2011