By Stephen Dick
CNHI News Service

China’s Liu Xiaobo will not be on hand to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10 in Oslo, which illustrates that China has a long way to go in ensuring its people have fundamental rights that the state can’t usurp.

Economically, however, the Chinese government is doing just about everything right. The economy didn’t skip a beat when the rest of the world plunged in 2008. It continues to grow about 9 percent per year. The U.S. was thrilled with 2.5 percent growth in the third quarter.

The reason for China’s success is an activist government that looks at its economy with a capital E (macro) while the so-called free-market countries look at the lowercase (micro). While the mice in the free market scurry about in the never-ending quest for short-term profits, China strategically plans its economy and fortifies it with infusions of cash for research and development and production.

China knows it lives by its exports, and to keep them shipping out of the country it has to plan for economic continuation. While the U.S. and other western powers are content with generational booms and busts that can be devastating to the countries as well as its workers, China hums along.

Are there some lessons to be learned from the Far East? In the U.S., we’re used to judging a state-planned economy, such as the former Soviet Union, as a way to guarantee poverty and scarcity of goods, being awash in pollution and generally a rusted out infrastructure that an insular economy can’t sustain. China saw that too.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Chinese officials opened up their economy to foreign investors and manufacturing but kept a guiding hand on the transactions to steer it in the best interests of the nation, something unimaginable in the U.S.

U.S. corporations like to think they are free of all government actions, but most wouldn’t exist without tax relief and abatements from local and state governments. Unlike China, however, this is only good for the corporations, not the communities they are in or the workers who toil for them.

Chinese workers, on the other hand, are becoming more proactive, demanding higher wages and unions, and the government is encouraging this. Imagine that in the U.S., where unions are under constant harassment and attack.

China is doing so well that the western world — one that long ago ceded economic growth to private companies whose only goal is enriching themselves — is crying foul, saying they can’t compete. They never said that about the Soviet Union, but China’s sophisticated managed markets are making neo-liberals heads spin.

China may one day realize that individual rights will not threaten the foundations of its state capitalism. But it looks like the U.S. will never recognize that left to its unfettered devices, capitalism will ruin a society and turn it into something similar to the economic decay in the former Soviet Union.

We’re already seeing the effects, such as rotting infrastructure, environmental disasters, shrinking manufacturing, poverty and scarcity of goods and too much money to the military.

Americans can’t imagine themselves heading down this path, but the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming toward us.

Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com. CNHI News Service distributes his column.