As a well travelled author, Gerard Lemos, has has the privilege of understanding the failures of many countries across various continents.
In suggesting that a substantial majority of the 1.4 billion strong Chinese population, will probably not be able to enjoy the benefits of secure employment, welfare benefits, pensions and all trappings of social security, Gerard Demos was not implying that China will inevitably collapse and fail.
Rather, even as early as 1989, what the world often saw as the students demonstrations, popping up all over Chinese campuses and cities, were in fact mixed with a large group of farmers and factory workers too.
Given this reality, the Reform Movement of 1978, marked by the proverbial opening up of China, had by 1989, been met with numerous policy missteps, land dispossession of the masses and the marked increase in the cost of living in the first decade of restructuring.
Based on his experience in the United Kingdom (UK) where Gerard Lemos constantly witnessed the failure of any amount of social and economic engineering—- especially in Aylesbury, located in the Southeast of London—-the likelihood of China pulling off a massive miracle to help all the Chinese live a life not stricken with endemic poverty was likely to fail, if not already failing systematically.
The likea of Gerard Lemos should not be criticised for trying to prick the dream of China. If anything, books such as “The End of the China Dream: How Chinese People Fear The Future,” even if it was written in 2013, should not be dismissed outright as insolent and impertinent.
With the rise in the cost of food, fuel, fertilizer and animal feed, the world is without doubt facing many head winds. All of which exacerbated by the rapacious effects of Coronavirus, conflict batween Ukrain and Russia and more recently the draw down in the economic activities of China and the US, due to a smorgasbord of issues, many of which have rendered China and the United States (US) less amenable to any solutions let alone a time out.
The latter is needed to address the devastating effects of climate change, the increasing rise in the Gini Co Efficiency of many countries in the Global North and Global South.
As and when this book by Gerad Lamos was completed in 2013, there were already 180,000 labor proteats in China a year. Although prominent academic journals such as the China Quarterly could easily have identified more than a half a million such protests a year; albeith with different intensity and endurancr.
Once again, it is not that China is unhappy. The neo liberal economic system that seems to be perched on top of the world, known as the “Washington Consensus,” appears to be meeting many stumnling halts.
The cost of borrowing money is not only going up but even banks and institutions are struggling to find the extra financial yardage to tide themselves over.
Focused in the main on Chungqing, one of the fourth largest cities in China after Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Gerard Lemos proved capable in explaining the difficulties of both ending poverty in and across China, based on market orthodoxy, invariably, even central planning, since decades of trying with social welfare after the end of Word War II in 1945, has been struggling endlessly. With inter-generation impact.
Gerard Lemos has opened the way for a stronger understanding of everything socially disruptive that has plagued the world—- not just China.
Readers are well advised to read the book with the larger conext of trying to understand why social justice, both of the economic and political kinds, remain maladjusted to the policy tool box of many governments and leaders.