The Impact Of The New Labor Law In China New Hiring: Fill & Download for Free

They’re HUGE.Earlier this week, I answered a question about the benefits that China’s One Child Policy did for the Chinese people in Terry Lo's answer to What good outcomes have come from China’s one-child policy?I didn’t cover the problems, or lightly touched on some of the problems, in my last answer about the benefits, which resulted in a TON of comments on why I hadn’t touched the negatives at length. So this post will cover on the negatives.(from SCMP)To summarize why the whole policy was made in the first place, the state of population growth was out of control, strangling their finances, suppressing the quality of life of families and outstripping their resources.Had they not acted in 1980, China would have undergone widespread famine by 2040’s with population hitting as high as 3 billion by 2060. As is, the policy prevented about 400 million births[1] as of 2010 according to the China Daily. I’d wager that China’s would never have developed into the 2nd most powerful economy (though likely in the top 20).(from NamViet News)But the problem is that this social experiment in regulated birth control may have had good intentions, and actually did some good, it also had all sorts of major issues that’s going to cripple China severely for decades to come.So here they are:“We Want Boys.” - The Male / Female ImbalanceChinese culture is fixed on the idea that a boy is the preferred child wanted. But when there’s only 1 kid allowed except under certain exceptions, an underground home made eugenics experiment was created by the Chinese people itself. Girls and handicapped kids would be aborted, abandoned, in often outright “killed by accident”. In the documentary, One Child Nation, one “fixer” described how for $50 to $100 US, they would take the unwanted girl baby and abandon the child in a farmers’ market with $20 US attached to each child. Several girls died of exposure. No one wanted them. No one even touched them as the babies were bitten alive by insects, and died slow painful deaths by dehydration and exposure.(from ZME Science)[2]The normal ratio of girls to boys in any society is 51 girls for every 49 boys. In China, the ratio is about 54 BOYS for every 46 girls. That’s led to a situation where 24 million men[3] presently can’t find wives right now. There will be as many as 30–35 million men in the very near future will be looking for wives, only not to find any available. Worse, this is ALREADY underway as this fundamental imbalance would have come into play as early as 2000 (or 20 years after the One Child Policy started). So for 2 decades, there are already tons of sexually frustrated men who can’t find wives, and advocates are now trying to legalize prostitution in China to cope with their needs.There’s also a huge number of completely unreported women. In many of the rural areas, daughters were deliberately under-reported or described as non-existent. All of these women are pretty much stuck where they are as they legally do not exist. Families who didn’t kill or abandon the girls instead raised the girls, but the estimated numbers make up only a portion of the missing women in the population if they are ever registered. But as they’re unregistered, they’re not even citizens. They can’t work, are home schooled and have no prospects at all. They can’t even be married. As such, this “ghost” population essentially doesn’t even exist.“Boys, Boys, Boys.” - The Male / Female Imbalance Part IIThink of it. If there are only 46 girls for every 54 boys, then the genetic balance and the greater work opportunities have really skewed what’s needed to simply MAINTAIN the population has ALSO been skewed.(from Share America[4] )[There are 34 million more Chinese men than Chinese women in a total population of 1.4 billion. The gender gap is the widest for those of marriage age. In 2018, China had 280 males aged 15–29 for every 100 females of that age, or nearly 3 to 1, according to the United Nations.[5] ]Under a normal situation, you’d be expecting about 50 couples out of every 100 (yes, not including same sex relationships for simplicity’s sake in this situation) which would yield about 50 kids (I’ll explain why not too much more). The problem is that in order to grow the population, those 50 couples really should be having 105 kids (to just maintain the population and compensate for child death). That’s a HUGE deficit. That means that each of those 46 couples really should be having 2.6 kids each.All of these missing girls are the lost“The Leftover Women” aka the Sheng Nu 剩女 - The Male / Female Imbalance Part IIIThe culture regards getting married and having kids as tantamount in the Chinese blood. So men are looking for women in PRIME breeding age. That means 24 and YOUNGER. Women who focus on their career prospects first and then start looking for husbands after 25 to 27 become unwanted, and have a HUGE problem with finding husbands.(from NOLASIA[6] )Now this is the age range and breakdown in 2018 of the male and female population in China. This graph wouldn’t have changed too much in the 2 years, so let’s work out the general numbers.Let’s say that most men in China looking for wives would be in the 20–35 age range, and let’s assume the same for women. Based on this chart, that’s about 170 million men looking for a wife in that range. Now let’s look at the numbers of women available, that’s of the age range, and how many are considered “acceptable” age. From the chart as of 2018, that means 150 million women are looking for husbands, but of those under 25 years of age, only 45 million would be considered acceptable. That means 105 million, out of pure ageism, are being excluded from this. There’s no researched numbers that I can find that tell how many still manage to find a husband, but given the society pressures, I’d say probably 2/3 will still find a husband eventually. That means about 50 million women are being left out of marriage for absolutely no reason except for a reverence for the biological clock.(from YouTube - Business Insider[7] )That skews the birth ratio even FURTHER from 2.6 children needed per couple to just maintain the population to somewhere around 3.1 or more per couple. In this age, there is no way that China’s couples are going to mass embrace that, even when the allowable limit for kids now is TWO (still below the standard 2.1 per couple needed just to maintain a population).Now let’s also throw in one special factor that would make an even BIGGER difference. In a given population, it can be expected that about 10% (as per the Kinsey report) are gay. Needless to say, that would affect the available men and women as well, and skews the numbers even higher to a ratio of 3.9 kids per couple. If the CCP can't convince people to have TWO kids, how are they going to get them to have as much as FOUR.Retirement? The effect on the Workforce.An ideal situation for any society would be a high ratio of workers to retirees. The US is presently about 4 to 1. Germany is around 3 to 1. China was an incredible 7.8 to one around the 80’s and 90’s and has since plummeted to about less than 3 to 1 in some parts of China, to as little as 1.5 to 1 in some provinces.(from the IMF via International Liberty[8] )When China first established the retirement age of 60 for men, 55 for women, in 1978, the expected age and life expectancy (as everyone were essentially farmers living with back breaking labor) was 66. Now its 76. The pension deficit in 2019 was $190 BILLION. All attempts to reform the ages failed in 2017, though Premier Xi might be able to change it now.(from Time Magazine, Feb 7 2019[9] )But seeing as how things are, retirement spending will take up to 50% of the entire GDP by 2050. Combined with the low worker ratio, that’s going to be devastating for the entire economy, and will cripple China’s economy. And this process has ALREADY begun as every child born in 1960 (and would have been 20 yrs old when the policy started) is now of retirement age.Sex TraffickingThis demand has spilled over to the surrounding countries around China, leading to the outright KIDNAPPING and FORCED MARRIAGE of women in the rural areas of China. [10]As per the paper, “Gendercide and the cultural context of sex trafficking in China”, an estimated 10,000 to 20,000[11] are trafficked each year. From 1991 to 1996, Chinese police freed 88,000 kidnapped women and arrested 143,000. From 2001 to 2003, Chinese police freed an additional 42,000 kidnapped women and children.[12](from the Diplomat[13] )From Human Rights Watch [14] :[Human Rights Watch… investigated bride trafficking from northern Myanmar into China. Many women and girls in that part of Myanmar belong to an ethnic minority that is vulnerable due to a long-running conflict and displacement in the region. These women and girls are typically tricked by brokers who promise well-paid employment across the border in China. Once in China, they find themselves at the mercy of the brokers, who sell them for around $3,000 to $13,000 to Chinese families. Once purchased they may be held prisoner and pressured to produce babies as quickly as possible. Similar stories have been documented by journalists and researchers in Cambodia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Vietnam, among others.][For years, it was easy for China to ignore the issue. The women and girls being trafficked are often ethnic or religious minorities, from impoverished communities, or, in the case of North Korea, on the run from their own abusive regime. Violence against women and girls is often a low priority for governments. And all of the affected countries have complicated relationships and deep power imbalances with China. The consequence has been that their own governments also often show little concern about the fate of women and girls trafficked to China.]This is only going to get worse long before it gets better.Two generations of spoiled kids. The Little Emperors and the Previous SnowflakesKnown as the 4–2–1 family structure, ONE child gets spoiled by TWO parents and FOUR living grandparents.This is possibly creating whole generations of entitled, selfish brats… the next generation of China.(from the Calgary Herald[15] )From the article: China: Study shows 'little emperors' are less trusting, less competitive and less conscientious:[(The children had) indications that those in the study were more sensitive and nervous — are no surprise, said Zou Hong of the School of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, who was not involved in the research.]["Only children in Chinese families are loved and given almost everything by their families and they can get resources at home without competition," she said. "Once they enter society, they are no different from other people. Having been overly protected, they feel a sense of loss and show less competitiveness."]While this isn’t necessarily a description of what these kids will grow up to, it definitely would have a huge effect in other ways. Most of these kids have grown up with no uncles, aunts, brothers, or sisters. There’s no or very few cousins. This limits the familial social interaction greatly, that the long term effects are still being studied.The population will start to plummet and age FAST.2050 will be the key tipping point. The number of available workers has just started to increase, and will increase drastically year after year.(From the US Census Bureau via the Guardian[16] )Song Limin of the Population Research Institute at Liaoning University states that Chinese births has peaked already in 2018, and will never exceed more than 15 million a year in the future.(from the Guardian[17] )The One Child Policy was now bred into the population over 35 years, or 2 generations of Chinese. And now that most of them have experienced middle-class life, few if any want to risk losing their lifestyle with additional children.(from whatsonweibo[18] )As such, they’re ignoring the government policy and slogans. There was a brief 8% boost in the child birth rate in 2016, and then faded away the year after, and has come back to earth. It’s not happening.And even though the child birth rate is plummeting, immigration won’t be an option due to cultural issues, distrust and even lack of an immigration option for non-Asians to get citizenship. Changing the immigration policy is is not something that can even be solved in any means in the short term. From 2000 to 2020, about 50,000 foreigners came to China to live, of which 20,000 were from Africa due to the various Belt and Road and development projects. The remaining 30,000 are spread out all over China, though mostly in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. This speaks volumes, as China’s greatest years of growth took place in the last 20 years, and yet only 30,000 had come to live. People simply see China as a nice place to visit, but sure as hell won’t want to live there. Canada ALONE brought in 313,580 immigrants just in 2019.Worse, a total OVERHAUL of the cultural system would be required; one on a fundamental level. That’s something that takes generations to fix. Even OTHER Asians don’t want to live in China.And even if that whole issue was corrected somehow, the raw numbers of immigrants needed to maintain the population would be in the TENS of MILLIONS. This would be unprecedented in world history, especially for a country that has always been almost xenophobic on a cultural level.Rise in Sex DiscriminationWomen who DO want to have a 2nd child are finding out that this would jeopardize their careers. Businesses that are used to the idea that their female employees might cost them 1 maternity leave are now overlooking women on purpose due to the perceived cost issues.From the Economist, July 26, 2018[19] :[The loosening of family-planning rules is also creating new problems for women. In the past, bosses knew that female staff would take paid maternity leave only once. Now they fret about having to shell out multiple times. A survey by 51job.com, an employment website, found that 75% of companies were more reluctant to hire women after the two-child policy took effect. Another, by the All-China Women’s Federation, found that 55% of women had been asked personal questions in job interviews, such as: “Do you have a boyfriend?” or “When do you plan to have children?”][Providing maternity leave has become more costly for employers. Over the past two years most Chinese provinces have extended paid leave beyond the 98-day minimum mandated under national law, hoping this will encourage more families to have a second child. China has laws against sex discrimination, including a rule that bars firms from firing pregnant women until their child is at least one year old, but enforcement is lax. Executives have “zero fear” of punishment, says Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.][In a survey carried out last year by Zhaopin, a jobs website, a third of women reported that their wages fell after giving birth (though for some this may be because they worked fewer hours). Some 36% said they were demoted. At an arbitration court in Beijing, a mother who gives her name as Xiao Wei recently secured a small settlement from a state-owned firm that she says treated her and other pregnant women unfairly. But she says finding a new job while her seven-month-old son is still breastfeeding is likely to be a “hopeless cause”.]So this huge experiment is going to impact China for decades. This has the potential likelihood to cripple China economically just as they were starting to rise to take on the leading role in the world hegemony.It simply lasted far too long (at least 10–15 years), and programmed their population in a way that was never intended. And there isn’t any decent solution as well as Japan and South Korea are now already starting to feel the SAME problems, just 10–15 years earlier. China’s sole advantage that I can see presently are that they have some time to act and watch these 2 countries and seeing their solutions, or downfalls to their age pyramid.Footnotes[1] Study: China faces 24M bride shortage by 2020[2] China and the one child policy…. - ppt download[3] Study: China faces 24M bride shortage by 2020[4] China's woman shortage creates an international problem | ShareAmerica[5] China's woman shortage creates an international problem | ShareAmerica[6] Retirement Options in China - NOLASIA[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=891JxeoNM7Q[8] IMF Data from Asia: Aging Populations Will Mean More Taxes and Fewer Benefits for Workers Trapped in Government-Run Retirement Programs[9] China’s Aging Population Is a Major Threat to Its Future[10] http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=susan_tiefenbrun[11] http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf[12] http://www.newsweek.com/id/92948/page/1[13] China’s Bride Trafficking Problem[14] “Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go” | Human Rights Watch[15] China: Study shows 'little emperors' are less trusting, less competitive and less conscientious[16] Can China recover from its disastrous one-child policy?[17] Can China recover from its disastrous one-child policy?[18] https://www.whatsonweibo.com/from-one-child-policy-to-two-child-policy/[19] China’s two-child policy is having unintended consequences

Because China has never forgotten how it lost Hong Kong to Britain in the 1800s and how Britain poisoned its people with dried latex obtained from the seed capsules of a plant called Papaver somniferum.In 1839 the Qing emperor instructed Commissioner Lin Zexu to end the illegal opium trade with Britain.Lin came to Canton (Guangzhou) and made changes within a matter of months of his arrival. He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers and confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes. He initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed.Lin then resorted to using force and ordered a large amount of British opium seized from the western merchants’ warehouses. A month and a half later, the merchants gave up nearly 1.2 million kg of opium. Beginning 3 June 1839, 500 workers labored for 23 days to destroy it, mixing the opium with lime and salt and throwing it into the sea. He even composed an elegy apologising to the gods of the sea for polluting their realm.Lin also sent a letter to Queen Victoria addressing the opium issues. The following is an excerpt of Lin’s letter to the British Queen:“We find that your country is sixty or seventy thousand li from China. The purpose of your ships in coming to China is to realize a large profit. Since this profit is realized in China and is in fact taken away from the Chinese people, how can foreigners return injury for the benefit they have received by sending this poison to harm their benefactors?They may not intend to harm others on purpose, but the fact remains that they are so obsessed with material gain that they have no concern whatever for the harm they can cause to others. Have they no conscience?I have heard that you strictly prohibit opium in your own country, indicating unmistakably that you know how harmful opium is. You do not wish opium to harm your own country, but you choose to bring that harm to other countries such as China. Why?The products that originate from China are all useful items. They are good for food and other purposes and are easy to sell. Has China produced one item that is harmful to foreign countries? For instance, tea and rhubarb are so important to foreigners' livelihood that they have to consume them every day. Were China to concern herself only with her own advantage without showing any regard for other people's welfare, how could foreigners continue to live?I have heard that the areas under your direct jurisdiction such as London, Scotland, and Ireland do not produce opium; it is produced instead in your Indian possessions such as Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Patna, and Malwa. In these possessions the English people not only plant opium poppies that stretch from one mountain to another but also open factories to manufacture this terrible drug.As months accumulate and years pass by, the poison they have produced increases in its wicked intensity, and its repugnant odor reaches as high as the sky. Heaven is furious with anger, and all the gods are moaning with pain! It is hereby suggested that you destroy and plow under all of these opium plants and grow food crops instead, while issuing an order to punish severely anyone who dares to plant opium poppies again.A murderer of one person is subject to the death sentence; just imagine how many people opium has killed! This is the rationale behind the new law which says that any foreigner who brings opium to China will be sentenced to death by hanging or beheading. Our purpose is to eliminate this poison once and for all and to the benefit of all mankind.The British, instead of shutting down its international drug trafficking operation, sent a naval force to China so as to impose reparations for the financial losses incurred by its British traders over the seized opium.On 21 June 1840, a British naval force arrived off Macao and moved to bombard the port of Dinghai. In the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its superior ships and guns to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire.The war was concluded with the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the first of Unequal Treaties between China and Western powers. The treaty forced China to cede the Hong Kong Island and surrounding smaller islands to Britain, as well as pay large sums of money as damages to Britain.So, with such humiliation experienced by the Chinese, do you think China would let Hong Kong go independent, or worse go back to UK?Ref:Lin Zexu - WikipediaOpium Wars - WikipediaEdit: Just want to add that even though opium in those days under the British East India company was mainly produced by the Indians in northern India for the Chinese market, it was also hard on the Indian farmers.According to a BBC report in 2019, it was said that Britain's opium trade in China actually impoverished the Indians. In those days, poppy was harvested by an estimated 1.3 million peasant households in northern India. By the end of the 19th Century, poppy farming had an impact on the lives of some 10 million people in what is now the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.New research by Dr Rolf Bauer, a professor of economic and social history at the University of Vienna, has found that the British opium business did not bolster India's rural economy. Dr Bauer concluded that the opium business was hugely exploitative and ended up impoverishing Indian peasants. "Poppy was cultivated against a substantial loss. These peasants would have been much better without it," Dr Bauer said.Exports, mainly to China, increased from 4,000 chests per year at the beginning of the 19th Century to more than 60,000 chests (15 times) by the 1880s. Opium became the second-most important source of revenue for the colonial state, after land taxes.Even so, the lives of Indian farmers did not become better. The British monitored Indian poppy farmers, enforced contracts and quality with police-like authority. Indians workers were given commissions based on the weight of opium delivered. Interest-free advance payments were offered to poppy farmers who could not access easy credit. However, Dr Bauer found that what was bad for the farmers was what they paid for rent, manure, irrigation and hired workers was higher than the income from the sale of raw opium.In other words, the price the Indian peasants received for their opium did not even cover the cost of growing it. And they were soon trapped in a "web of contractual obligations from which it was difficult to escape".Stiff production targets fixed by the British also meant farmers could not decide whether or not to produce opium. They were "forced to submit part of their land and labour to the colonial government's export strategy". Local landowners forced their landless tenants to grow poppy; and peasants were also kidnapped, arrested and threatened with destruction of crops, criminal prosecution and jail if they refused to grow the crop. "It was a highly coercive system," Dr Bauer said.So, that being the case, who do you think benefitted immensely from the opium trade? The Chinese, Indian or the British?Edit (27 Nov 2020): Some readers have asked if Lin's letter ever reached Queen Victoria. Unfortunately, it didn't.After Lin wrote the letter, a Captain Warner of the British merchant vessel Thomas Coutts agreed to carry a translated version of Lin's letter to England. The vessel was then operating under the charter of the East India Company and was a fast sailing ship.(The vessel Thomas Coutts)The letter eventually reached England and was handed over to the ship owner. He then in turn sought an audience with then British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.Palmerston, at the time, dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain stood at the height of its imperial power. He held office almost continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865. Some of his belligerent actions as Foreign Secretary were in fact, highly controversial, and have been regarded by historians as prototypes of liberal interventionism practice - a foreign policy doctrine to intervene in other sovereign states with actions such as military invasion in order to pursue liberal objectives.In any case, Palmerston rejected seeing the ship owner and refused to accept the letter. He didn't think the correct diplomatic protocols were followed. It was also evident that he regarded Chinese laws and diplomats as subordinate to the Crown, and did not regard China as an equal diplomatic counterpart with full legal rights within its territories.The letter would later make its way to The Times and was published on 11 Jun 1840. But by the time it appeared in print, the British government had already decided to send troops to impose reparations for the financial losses of the British traders in Canton and to guarantee future security for trade. It was in fact decided just a month earlier in May 1840.By Jun, British troop movements in the Far East were well underway. And 10 days after the letter appeared in The Times, a British naval force arrived off Macao on 21 Jun and moved to bombard the port of Dinghai. The rest, as they say, is history.Ref:The Indiaman 'Thomas Coutts'Lieutenant Charles Cameron's Opium War Diary on JSTORHenry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston - Wikipediahttps://web.stanford.edu/group/journal/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Su_SocSci_2008.pdfOpium Wars - Wikipedia

Disclaimer: This is a Pakistani perspective on the question.Let's start this with a story.Ajay Kapur was the director of Global Strategy Research at Citibank, during the oil spike in the first decade of the 21st century where oil would go on to reach 140 bucks a barrel in 2008 (and 160 USD a barrel in around 2014 I think).Ajay headed research into why the US equity market was not being impacted by the spike in oil prices. Logically speaking, a spike in oil prices in the US should lead to a spike in fuel prices at the pumps leading to less disposable income in the hands of US consumers. Which means, they would purchase fewer goods and spend less, leading to a businesses having less income. This would lead to a reduction in economic activity that should translate into a decline in stock prices for companies impacted by the reduced income.The disconnect between stock market and the economic situation of the US was explained when Kapur factored in the fact that the US was a plutonomy: where the vast majority of its wealth was held by a small, concentrated cabal of families whose economic sway was vastly more powerful than the numerically larger but economically less powerful working class (and shrinking middle class).Ajay’s purpose for these findings was to figure out which stocks his clients should invest in in the US market during a high oil price period, and he correctly identified luxury companies as the stable stock to invest in. Plutocrats are not impacted by fuel prices. They don’t live on budgets and from paycheck to paycheck. Their spending on luxury items would remain as is even during a recession and thus this stock would continue to yield profits to its investors.But the more disturbing revelation of Ajay’s report was as follows:Kapur’s insight was that, if the majority of a country is owned by very few people, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the oil price does. The oil price is important to people who are on a budget. If the cost of daily commute doubles in the space of a couple of months, then inevitably that will reduce the amount of money you have to spend on other things: holidays, trips to the cinema, even food. But if you are very wealthy, then the proportion of your income that you spend on travel is very low, so your spending will barely be affected at all. If your customary purchases are Birkin bags, Sunseeker yachts, or fourth home, perhaps in Miami, then changes to the oil price don’t matter, which has important consequences for the profitability of the companies that make those products.Kapur thought too many of his fellow analysts were looking at the average consumer, when, in an age of inequality, the average consumer’s role in the economy was increasingly marginal. He used the word ‘plutonomy’ to describe economies where the wealthy have a disproportionate share of the assets (he claimed to have invented it, although it dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century when it was used as a synonym for economics), places like Britain, America or Canada. His analysis was original and provided a fascinating insight into how the kind of luxury spending detailed in the previous two chapters is affecting the world.‘In a plutonomy, there is no such thing as “the US consumer” or “the UK consumer’”, or indeed “the Russian consumer”,’ Kapur wrote. ‘There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.’ According to the Citigroup analysts’ research, the top million households in the United States had approximately the same wealth as the bottom 60 million households. And rich people have relatively little of their wealth tied up in their homes, meaning that a far higher proportion of that wealth is disposable. If you looked at just financial assets, and exclude housing from the calculation, the top million households held more of the sum total of American wealth than the bottom 95 million households put together.Moneyland: The Inside Story Of The Crooks And Kleptocrats Who Rule The WorldWhen wealth concentration and inequality reach such heights that your average citizen isn’t really owning much of the economic pie anymore, then answer me this: In a political system where political factions need money to generate influence and presence and retain political power, who should they approach as potential donors?The average citizen? Or the plutocrats?If 20 families in my country own 60–70% of the wealth in it, what exactly is my impetus as a politician to serve the needs of the people when my access to the wealth that drives the political machinery stems from only a few notable wealthy elites?If you have 5 million people living in desperate poverty, illiterate and malnourished vs 200 living in ultra-elite, wealthy status, it’s not hard in a democracy to manipulate electoral politics and voting in a manner that the votes of the 5 million end up not counting despite their numerical advantage.Which is why democracy runs aground in nations like Afghanistan or the Latin American banana republics.Americans surely must feel that their country is a democratic one. They can vote, they have separations of power, there is freedom of speech, courts of law.But I suppose if you posed the same question to black communities wracked with police brutality, gang warfare and urban decay the concept of being a democratic nation suddenly doesn’t have much of a glow to it.And I guess when Kent state university students were being gunned down in their college campuses for protesting against their country’s participation in war crimes in Southeast Asia, well America must not have felt very democratic back then.Similarly, put 50 Pakistani elder men in a drawing-room to discuss politics and they will feel that it’s quite a democratic setting.Ask their wives who have been banished to the Kitchen to cook feasts for their pleasure, and ask how much democracy exists in the stench and heat of the Kitchen, amidst hot burning metal pans and sweat pouring through silk shirts.The tribe may define their tribal Jirga as democratic, even as it passes death by stoning sentences. The Swedes may define their democracy as flawed if the Prime Minister takes a BMW to work instead of a bike.Democracy itself is a difficult thing to measure. We have tried though. We have indexes that measure how free a country is.These same indexes declared Russia quite free in the 90s, under Yeltsin, even as young women disappeared from the streets, kidnapped to be trafficked into brothels in Europe. Or young Russian men dying in wars in Chechnya and succumbing to AIDS, alcoholism, and despair that wracked post-USSR collapse Russia.If you ask somebody from Pakistan, they will define the perfect democracy as “corrupt” politicians hanging from lamp posts, judges and generals calling the shots and liberal “fascists” put in their place.Same for other countries like America where the Republican definition of democracy varies immensely from the Bernie Bro's definition of it.Quite often: Democracy's definition changes to suit the advantage of the person defining it. The college-educated, suburban soccer mom might voice her opposition to the illiterate getting a vote.The army man may say that veterans should have a greater say in a democracy than civilians.The rural farmer may want to stick it to the big city types and reduce the power of urban, populous areas in favor of the vast countryside with maybe a dozen people per dozen square kilometer.Given all this differences in perceptions for what it means to be a democracy among people, as well as difficulty in agreeing to what standards a democracy should be measured by, the important thing to keep in mind when trying to study China’s democracy is simply that the definition of democracy and perception of it in China may not be the same as the one man, one vote democracy of the other nations.From the Pakistani viewpoint: China’s democracy is built, not around the principle of equal representation, but wealth circulation.But it seems quite clear to us at least that the Chinese government ensures a sense of equality and representation among its citizens not by giving them a vote directly, but by circulating wealth among them so that they remain relevant and key players to the Chinese economy. And thus, retain a relevant voice in public affairs by means of their individual economic power.There has been a concerted attempt to paint China’s political and economic philosophy as a capitalist or semi-capitalist, particularly from the proponents of capitalism who are eager to use China’s success to bolster the credentials of the free market, neo-liberal, deregulated form of economics.But the view from Islamabad sees the PRC leadership as still fairly dedicated Marxists who still uphold the philosophy of Marxism even as their methods have changed.Central to the concept of the Marxist theory of labor is the fact that society is split between the working class who produce all the goods and commodities that society needs through their labor. And on top of them is a ruling class that takes the surplus-value of their labor and returns to them a fraction of the value while keeping the remaining portion with themselves while having contributed no labor to the production of goods.This is the basis of the strained social relations in society and the injustice that characterizes it. That one class takes more than it puts into society in terms of labor (whether physical or intellectual). And leads to the emergence of class warfare.If you don’t want to go all out with Marxist revolutionary tactics and seize the means of production/abolish private property: the softer approach is to circulate wealth in your society by returning a greater fraction of the surplus-value of labor put in by the working class back to them.Wealth circulation can take many forms: It can be a literal transference of wealth from government taxation to the working class. Or it can be the implementation of social welfare programs, affordable healthcare, education, and subsidies, etc.This lessens the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor and the surplus value they are deprived of, leading to a softening of class warfare lines and a just, equitable and egalitarian society to rise.The Scandinavian nations can be good examples of this.But note, that the definition of the just and equal society in Marxist POVs is not based on concepts like freedom of speech, the right to vote and so on. But on economic terms. Almost as if the ideals of freedom of speech and the right to vote can only arise properly from the seed of an economically just society where wealth is circulated and resources distributed fairly.This is the basis of the Chinese democratic ideal: Not to blindly give the vote and freedom of speech while having no plan for economic wealth circulation. But to develop a system of wealth circulation first that allows for wealth redistribution and poverty alleviation.And it has worked:China's poverty reduction at a crucial stage: white paperBecause human freedom and rationality as ideals and the human intrinsic desire to live in a free, just society can only arise if the material and economic conditions a person finds themselves in are just in a material manner.Otherwise, you end up with a democracy where the top 1% wealthy elite control the bulk of the economic pie and utilize their wealth to control media, political, law enforcement institutions to control and neutralize the voting power of the millions under them.But if you have a large, educated and materially well off society that is capable of thinking about subjects beyond their day to day survival, then political ideals like freedom and democracy have a better chance of automatically manifesting (bar some external manipulation).Countries like Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan right now are examples of nations where the ideals of one man, one vote and democracy were implemented without any care given to the economic systems of wealth circulation and wealth redistribution.A democratic system without institutions strong enough to implement a nationwide, effective taxation system, anti-corruption bodies strong enough to ensure the tax was spent on the public welfare and legislative bodies honest enough to implement social welfare and public benefits programs is a democratic system that gives way to rapacious exploitation.And you end up with elected parliamentarians looting the public exchequer, tin-pot dictators offshoring billions in wealth, political parties implementing tributary payoffs to maintain goons on the payroll. Billions if not trillions in wealth are offshored, misplaced, misspent or not utilized at all.And a democracy becomes a desperate scramble to steal and accumulate as many resources as you can to protect your clan, family or tribe at the expense of everyone else. Public education remains underfunded. Children die of treatable diseases on hospital floors. The police serve as hired thugs for the ruling elite. And the folk at the top accumulate and concentrate wealth and the products of the working class’s labor while the working class toils in misery at the bottom retaining a fraction of the value they create.This is the heart of the reason why post-colonial nations that adopted democracy before they could adopt strong institutions capable of taxation, anti-corruption and wealth circulation remained trapped in systemic poverty.Which is how we end up with countries where you are free to vote as you please but you can die of thirst and starvation, gunned down in the street by opposing political factions, die of treatable disease and have the grim duty of watching your children grow up malnourished and illiterate.The right to vote can mean so little in a society built upon economic injustice.China may have adopted capitalistic ways of generating value but they have retained the Marxist philosophy behind what to do with that surplus-value. In that, this surplus-value is invested back into the working class as affordable education, healthcare, jobs and so on to return to them the very value they create.And this economic justice is what translates into their attempts at creating a just society where the CPC manages and reduces the tensions between the working class and the owners of private property.Every revolution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.– Princess Irulan (Dune, Frank Herbert)If you think the CPC has cracked the code to economic justice though, you would be wrong. And even within the mighty political iron framework of the CPC, cracks have begun to appear:Eric Tse, who recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School of Finance, was gifted about US$3.88 billion in his family company's shares on Tuesday.That's not surprising, as his father Tse Ping was previously a committee member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country's top political advisory body.On October 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the younger Tse attended Beijing celebrations open only to invited guests and dignitaries.The company statement on Tuesday said Tse's parents had transferred the shares to him "to refine the management and inheritance of family wealth." The document was signed by the company's chairwoman, Theresa Tse -- Eric's sister.Shares aside, Tse also gained a new position -- executive director of the company's executive board committee. According to the company statement, before being given this role, he previously served as CEO at the North America arm of recruitment company Liepin.CNN has reached out to Tse for comment.Tse is part of a new wave of wealth in China. A "rich list" released earlier this month showed that although Chinese wealth is concentrated in the hands of tech entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical moguls -- like those in Tse's family -- are making ground. Pharmaceutical moguls make up 8 percent of China's rich list, double that of 10 years ago.Eric Tse, 24, just became a billionaire overnightAlas, nothing lasts forever. And while it seems that the engine of economic growth will continue to churn, for now, it appears that the political will and appetite within state institutions inside the PRC to restrain and contain the wealth concentration of wealthy, politically well-connected elite will slowly erode as the comforts of a post-revolutionary government settle in a Brezhnev style ossification of state apparatus.It should be kept in mind that the systemic damages from wealth concentration aren’t apparent immediately but take decades to manifest. And while the wealth concentration today may seem like a harmless side effect of Asia’s economic rise, 3 to 4 decades down the line the picture will be of ultra wealthy Chinese billionaires offshoring billions in wealth to starve public universities of research funds and pushing a shrinking middle class into poverty.Exactly what’s happening in America today.And THAT will be what undermines China’s democratic ideal far more than any ability or inability to vote.This is not a deterministic future though. And the anti-corruption drives under Xi have yielded results that can be measured empirically if you know what data to look at:In 2015, the accountancy firm Deloitte published a study of Swiss watches headlined Uncertain Times, which described how leading manufacturers of exclusive timepieces were gloomy about the future. The reason for the misery came not from a recession, or from any problem with the products, but rather from the fact that the government in China was cracking down on corruption, which was harming sales of the kind of lavish gifts that crooked officials had previously accepted in return for favorable decisions. ‘The pessimism about China and Hong Kong can be explained by the lower rates of growth in the economies of many emerging markets, and also the anti-corruption and anti-kickback legislation in China: these developments have led to a fall in the sales of luxury products,’ Deloitte’s analysts wrote. ‘81% of watch executives indicated that demand in China has fallen over the past 12 months due to anti-corruption legislation.’Luxury watches are popular among officials since they provide a discreet but effective way of advertising their power. In 2009, the Russian newspaper Vedomosti mischievously published a compilation of photographs of the watches worn by top officials at public events, noting each one’s price and contrasting that with the declared income of the official in question. The cheapest watch belonged to the head of the Audit Chamber, costing a mere 1,800 Swiss francs. The majority were in the $10–50,000 range, beyond which a handful of officials had really splashed out. The deputy mayor of Moscow won both first and second place, with watches costing $1.04 million and $360,000; while Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov’s watch came third, with an estimated price of $300,000. The article caused some embarrassment to top officials, which is perhaps why the official photographer photoshopped a $30,000 Breguet timepiece off the wrist of the Patriarch of Moscow, as he sat at a highly polished table in 2012. The photographer neglected to remove the watch’s reflection, however, which both made the Patriarch look ridiculous and also rather undermined his attempts to argue for a return to asceticism and traditional values under the moral leadership of himself.The watch controversy has not led to any concerted anti-corruption campaigns in Russia (perhaps to the relief of the manufacturers of luxury products), but a serious Chinese anti-corruption campaign began in 2012, with tens of thousands of people indicted, including members of previously untouchable classes – leading figures in the military, central government and provincial administrations. Officials stopped flaunting their wealth almost instantly, with dramatic consequences for the kind of businesses that Kapur had suggested his clients invest in, including businesses that produce luxury food and drink. France’s Bordeaux region had exported a mere 12,000 hectolitres of wine to China in 2005 but, within seven years, that had increased almost fiftyfold, to 538,000 hectolitres, with the ostentatious buying patterns of wealthy Chinese people utterly transforming the economics of French wine production. When the anti-corruption campaign started, and Chinese officials were no longer quite so willing to publicly imbibe bottles of Château Lafite, the region’s exports dropped by a quarter in two years. ‘Certainly, we are seeing fewer wealthy Chinese arriving on private planes and buying up €50,000 of wine in one go,’ a wine merchant rather laconically told a trade publication.The same thing happened to other Western manufacturers who had profited from booming sales of the kind of prestigious products popular among China’s Moneylenders. In 2014 the Scotch Whisky Association blamed what it euphemistically referred to as the ‘Chinese government’s austerity campaign’ for the fact sales to China and Singapore (which often re-exported to China) had dropped. By the end of 2016, sales to these two Far Eastern markets were down by almost 50 percent. Any investors who had bought into wine or spirits producers in the hope of riding Kapur’s plutonomy wave would have had a very rude shock.Moneyland: The Inside Story Of The Crooks And Kleptocrats Who Rule The WorldThere will always be a fork in the road moment for nations where they can choose what kind of future they want by deciding what aspects of society they are willing to tolerate and which ones they aren’t. Quite often, it’s the leaders at the top who set the pace for this tolerance and the lower hierarchies adjust accordingly.From our experience in Pakistan, we have been a flawed democracy at times and a military dictatorship at others. In either case, we have seen the power of our votes neutralized in a system where economic resources are concentrated and offshored or integrated into tributary systems. And not given back to the toiling masses as education, healthcare, and subsidies. Leaving millions trapped in desperate poverty, willing to sell their votes for a single meatloaf (this happens literally btw).Forget freedom and democracy, people are not even aware of what the power of their votes mean in a society where the wealthy elite control the levels of public education and media.So perhaps we would be keen to explore whether we too, should adopt the approach of establishing economic justice before we establish democratic ideals. Or perhaps democratic ideals are something that could arise as a consequence of economic justice.Only time will tell.