You want to understand what's happening in China? Contrast how the American and Chinese economies have developed.
A century and a half ago, most Americans still lived on farms and depended on agriculture for a living. Then, starting about a century ago, we began moving from farms into factories. By the mid-1950s, about a third of American workers were involved in manufacturing and the core of the American economy was in mass production. Then we started moving from factories into offices. Now the center of the economy is knowledge work, and many of us sit behind computers, analyzing symbols, crunching data, viewing spread sheets, or creating something brand new.
That 150-year passage from farm to factory to office hasn't always been easy. Families were uprooted and had to make entirely new lives for themselves. Whole towns and cities declined in some places and boomed in others. But we had a century and a half to make the transition. With that kind of time, some of the pain and trouble could be smoothed over.
Now look at China. It's making the same transition, from farm to factory to office tower. But it's doing it all within the span of a single generation -- in fact, much of it within the last 15 years. Change on this scale, at this pace, affecting almost a sixth of the world's population, has never been tried before. As difficult as it was for us over a century and a half, consider the trauma of it happening almost all at once.
Tens of millions of Chinese peasants who have known nothing for countless generations but working the land are now swarming into and around booming metropolises sprouting glass and steel office towers. Want to know why the Chinese are so intent on keeping their currency low relative to the dollar, and thereby exporting lots of manufactured goods? Because these millions need factory jobs.
Meanwhile, entire cities are sprouting up where none existed a few years ago. Entire valleys are suddenly flooded to create dams needed to supply energy. Entire regions are being excavated to acquire the raw materials needed to feed the factories. Industrial pollutants are making some places uninhabitable.
It's a cultural revolution more revolutionary than the disastrous one of Chairman Mao. And even though it holds out the promise of higher living standards for the great majority of Chinese, the upheaval is so immediate and its consequences so jarring that it's meeting sharp resistance. With no democracy to reflect and temper this discontent, it is expressing itself in boycotts, demonstrations and riots – which are sometimes met with brutal repression.
The question that haunts this nation is whether it can change its economy this fast and remain a stable society.
Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect. A version of this column originally appeared on Marketplace.
