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The decisive role, in
the XXI century Asia, will be played anyway by China that, due to its
several contradictions is the enigmatic country par excellence. It is
the sole that succeeds in combining a totalitarian and repressive regime,
formally still communist, with a tumultuous market economy that produced
development rates between 7% and 10% per year.
But the process has
not been painless. The new Chinese leadership, composed by the more
conservative president Jiang Zemin and by the more reformer premier
Zhu Rongji, must reckon with an increasing unemployment fed by the closure,
by degrees, of the big State industries, with a strong unrest between
the rich coast provinces and those desperately poor in the heartland,
with the uneasiness of the lands oppressed by a inefficient and corrupt
administration, and with a spread dissent that earlier has embodied
in the Falun Gong sect.
By the external watchers'
viewpoint, the Peking's targets seems often conflicting each other.
How is it possible to keep at the same time the sole party and to leave
place go the entrepreneurial spirit in people? Notwithstanding, it works,
and just the last weeks China made some steps that, in the western hopes,
could turn its metamorphosis into irreversible. First of all, it undersigned
with the European Union a wide range economic and trading collaboration
treat, that on a side removes the last obstacle against it admittance
at the WTO, but on the other side compels it to adopt a set of liberalization
measures oriented to influence also its internal balance. Second, it
obtained by the Congress, thanks to the strong will of president Clinton
and notwithstanding the objections of union-trades, the ratification
of the treat that allows it permanently accessing the United States
markets at the best conditions. Bill Clinton is so convinced that the
continuation of the economic development under the sign of the liberalization
will foster also the democratic evolution of China that he deems that
the Chinese-American treat is one of the mileposts of his presidency.
As regard to Hong Kong,
back three years ago to China after a century of Britannic dominion,
they have performed till now the agreements, leaving the ex colony (almost)
all the autonomy they promised. As regard to Taiwan, sometimes it blows
a cold wind, sometimes a hot wind. But a positive signal came from the
measured reaction at the election of Chen Shui-Bian, leader of the independentists,
as new president.
If this quiet climate
will kept, China will gain more consents for its aggregation to the
G8, that - along with the permanent seat at the UNO's Security Council
- will consecrate definitively its role as a great world power. Finally,
will the XXI century be the “century of Asia” or won't it? Analysts,
as we said, has become prudent.
Millstones round one's
neck are still several. Beside those examined in detail, it must be
reminded that in the heart of the South East, it survives a block of
socialist countries, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma, that represent
a brake for the collective development; that the continent still has
a frightening number of poor
- more than a billion
-and shows an alphabetisation
rate absolutely insufficient, obviously excepting Japan, Korea, Singapore
and few others; that in its centre it has constituted a dangerous and
backward-looking Islamic hotbed, ranging from Iran to Afghanistan, Pakistan
and in part the ex-soviet republics of central Asia and so on. Therefore,
by the moment, it is convenient to suspend the verdict waiting for a
sunny spell.
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