THE MYTH OF CHIN SURGING INCOME INEQUALITY,
an unfair social welfare system, and rising social tensions block China’s continued economic rise, says Dexter Roberts, with implications for companies and countries around the world. From the December 2, 2020, Humanities MemberLed Forum online program “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism.” DEXTER “TIFF” ROBERTS, Adjunct Instructor of Political Science and Mansfield Fellow, University of Montana; Nonresident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative; Author, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, & the Future of the World MEI FONG, Director of Communications and Strategy, The Center for Public Integrity— Moderator DEXTER ROBERTS: I’d like to start by talking about how I came to write my book, and in order to do so, I have to take everyone back about 20 years to the year 2000. At that point, I had been in China for about five years and had been covering the business story, mainly working for BusinessWeek full-time at that point. I had been spending a lot of time for that reason in the big cities of Beijing, where I was based, and Shanghai and Shenzhen and places like that. But that year, 2000, I did two cover stories that took me to a part of China that I had never been to before. The first of those [articles] was called “China’s Wealth Gap.” This story was looking at the already then-fast growing gap between the coastal regions of China and the interior. I went for this reporting to the province of Guizhou in Southwestern China, then and unfortunately still today, one of the much poorer parts of China. At that point, we’d seen a couple of decades since [China’s leader] Deng Xiaoping opened the economy and started reform. We’d seen a rapid growth, but much of that concentrated on the coast. So there was a policy by the then-leader, Jiang Zemin, called Develop the West, which was an effort to try to address that already strong growing gap between the coast and the interior that same year. [In] 2000, I went back for a second cover story, “The Great Migration.” I was looking at the already hundreds of millions of migrant workers that were, in response to this unequal
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
