Paper Tiger Balm Cannot Soothe Economic Woes

To put it succinctly, these cities illustrate the sheer stupidity of command economies – as if the world needed another lesson in the futility of such enterprises.

These feats of construction are impressive, but they also serve absolutely no useful purpose. In the United States we have seen what improper government encouragement can do to construction. In China the problem is massively amplified. Despite the U.S. federal government’s deepest desire to run everything, it simply is unable to. This is not a problem for Communist China, where political dissention is unlawful.

A crumbling wall in New South China mall.

In a desperate attempt to prove it is an economic powerhouse, the Chinese government has forced everyone to continue building vacant cities and empty commercial districts. The New South China Mall, widely hailed at its opening in 2005 as the largest mall in the world and a certain sign that China was to be the new driving force behind consumerism, is still 99% empty. The mall cannot even afford to keep on an adequate maintenance staff, meaning that the structure is already in serious disrepair. Yunnan University, built for 2.3 million students, has only 11,000 enrolled. How will it be possible to maintain such a sprawling infrastructure where there aren’t even a fraction of the people present necessary to even use it?

So why does the Chinese government refuse to admit that things are seriously out of whack? Well, first off that would mean they need to admit they were wrong, and entities like The Paramount Leader and his committees of Communist toadies are loath to admit such a thing. In any civilized country the people could simply vote the idiots out of office. Sadly, there is only one way to get the Communists out of office, and that is revolution. This is another reason the Chinese government doesn’t want the party to end. Admission of the scope and seriousness of the malfunction of the centralized command economy might lead to political chaos. Unless Hu Jintao can figure out a way to blame the West for China’s economic collapse (keep an eye out for this), such a total failure of the government to protect its citizens might finally lead to the widespread realization that the communist model (spoiler alert!) doesn’t work.