MR. MASLOW, CALL YOUR OFFICE

3/7/11

Today’s (i.e., Monday, 3/7’s) Wall Street Journal reports that China’s economic plans for this year through 2015 focus on improving the lot of those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder by, among other things, “encouraging” employers to raise wages in line with productivity redoubling efforts to maintain price stability, especially for basic commodities that comprise a gargantuan share of the budgets of the poor. The slight shift in emphasis away from growth toward redistribution of the fruits of that growth toward the poor was in place before the onset of the problems the Middle East is currently experiencing. The focus on inflation, however, received an unusual degree of emphasis at the National People’s Congress that started over the weekend.

What the renewed emphasis by the Chinese authorities on the lot of the underclass, and especially the concern about worldwide commodity inflation’s impact on the poor, indicates is that the Chinese leadership understands what starry-eyed types in the West are nowhere near comprehending: The unrest in the Middle East is at best only ancillarily a manifestation of a yearning for “freedom” and “democracy;” it is, primarily, a reaction to the ravaging effect of increasing commodity prices on the already meager livelihoods of these countries’ lower classes. For an insightful discussion of this topic, see my 2/3/11 post AFTER ALL THESE CENTURIES, THE EGYPTIANS STILL HAVE SOMETHING TO TEACH US.

The regimes that have been overthrown or that are currently experiencing dissent, or worse, are indeed oppressive dictatorships, but that has been the case since the Europeans abandoned their colonies in response to demands from the starry-eyed for “freedom” and “democracy.” So what changed to make the people finally rise up after enduring such political deprivation from the likes of Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi (or however he is spelling his name today)? Food prices rocketed upwards, strangling the already choking budgets of the poor in these post-colonial paradises.

Freedom and “democracy,” (whatever the latter is; no one seems to understand the concept, certainly no one in the Bush/Obama administration, but I digress) may be nice, but eating is nicer. People who live day to day and hand to mouth cannot be concerned with the things that preoccupy the faculty lounge at Yale or the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. People will tolerate authoritarianism, or worse, if their economic lot, balanced finely between survival and at least figurative starvation, consistently falls on the side of survival. But when the generalissimos can no longer deliver economically, then people get upset.

The Chinese understand this; most of the West, or at least most of Western governments and media, don’t. Perhaps that is why the “Jasmine Revolution” has not taken off in China.