From one casino to another

The headline is that China has overtaken Japan. It is now the world’s second-largest economy and it now has the US, currently the world’s largest economy, in its sights.

Kaoru Yosano, Japan’s minister of state for financial services, while welcoming China’s expansion as good news for his own country’s trading prospects, said: ‘As an economy, we are not competing for rankings but working to improve citizens’ lives.’ This is surely a rather tart comment aimed at those who get carried away with headlines.

I’m lucky enough to have visited both countries and my surface impression was that, despite Japan’s recent economic woes, the standard of living there was much higher than in mainland China, even though I was restricted to China’s more prosperous eastern seaboard.

I’m guessing that this wouldn’t exactly be news to China’s rulers. A few years back I was sat in a hotel lobby in Bangkok reading the Bangkok Post (Thailand’s English language newspaper). Inside was a four-page supplement taken out by the Chinese government, which partly dealt with its efforts to overcome the gap between rich and poor. This has been a consistent theme from the Chinese government recently.

Speaking at China’s annual parliamentary session in March 2010, Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, said: ‘We will not only make the “pie” of social wealth bigger by developing the economy, but also distribute it well. [We will] resolutely reverse the widening income gap.’

Nice platitudes but if there’s a lesson from the recent economic chaos in the ‘developed West’ , it is that the casino never stops rolling, which means big winners and even bigger losers.

Lyndon White
Editor, Processingtalk

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