Chapter 24 1. The shock and reflection brought by the slums

When talking about China's rise, it is always better to have an international comparison.My basic conclusion is that although China still has many problems, China's performance in the past three decades, especially in poverty eradication and modernization, is significantly better than other developing countries in the world, and in countries with economies in transition.To understand China better, we need international comparisons.India has developed relatively fast in recent years, and it is also a country that everyone talks about a lot. The talk of India's rise is also constantly appearing in domestic and foreign media.It should be said that in recent years, India has made remarkable performances in the software industry, pharmaceutical industry, and outsourcing industry, and has achieved achievements that are difficult for most developing countries to match.But according to my observation, the gap between India and China is still quite large. I estimate that India may not be able to reach China's current level of development in twenty years.Here I can talk about my feelings and thoughts about my visit to India.

My last visit to India was December 2008.Just a week before I arrived in Mumbai, on the night of November 26, Mumbai experienced its own 9/11. 10 terrorists attacked more than 10 targets in Mumbai (including the famous Taj Mahal Hotel, Mumbai Central Railway Station, Jewish activity center, etc.), but the Indian special forces arrived late, and it took 4 days to put down the attack , Killed 9 terrorists and captured 1 alive.The entire attack killed nearly 200 innocent people and injured nearly 300 others.Due to the terrorist attacks, the number of people coming to Mumbai dropped sharply, and half of the seats on the plane I took were empty.I used to arrive in Mumbai at night, so I didn't have many "air impressions" of the city.This time I chose a flight that arrived during the day, and I also chose a window seat, looking forward to seeing this legendary city in India from the air.At 11:20 in the morning, the plane descended slowly.I fixed my eyes on the ground, and I saw it clearly, and I was shocked. What I saw was not the magnificent outline of a modern metropolis, but the endless and densely packed slums.I have known for a long time that about 60% of the people in this big city of more than 14 million people still live in slums, but it is also the first time for me to see such a huge slum from the air. words to describe.

When I got out of the airport, four men rushed up to help me push my luggage. I asked the kind-looking guy to help me push it, and then I gave him a tip of 50 rupees, and got on a car with no air conditioning and no radio. Ambassador taxi.But I didn't expect that six hands knocked on the glass window of the taxi at the same time, and the three people who didn't carry my luggage also asked me for a tip.My driver yelled at me to "leave them alone" and drove away as soon as I stepped on the gas.I looked back through the car window, and the three men were holding on to my tipper, obviously trying to get a cut of him.The competition in India looks brutal.

In a taxi, driving on the avenue leading to the city center, the driver asked me, have you been to India before?I said, "I've been here, twenty years ago." He asked, "Do you think India has changed a lot?" I looked out the window, and there were still slums on both sides of the avenue, and said politely, "Some changes, your airport is expanding. "It's been said that the Airport Boulevard will be widened," he said, "but it hasn't been widened after several years." I asked him why, and he said, "The residents on both sides disagree." of slum dwellers have been highly politically mobilized to resist the road expansion.

After settling down in the hotel, I hurried to the train station.I took the doorless urban rail train in Mumbai, got on the train from Churchgate, the first stop in the city center, and sat all the way to Borivali, the terminal station in the north of Mumbai, running through the entire Greater Mumbai city, but what I saw along the way was still A large number of shabby houses and slums, and some newly-built buildings in some areas symbolize the desire to rise of India, but most of them are surrounded by ocean-like shabby houses.The next day, I visited a slum called Dharavi with my Indian friend Mr. S. It is said that this is the largest slum in Asia, with 1 million people living in it, and it is close to the financial center of Mumbai.Frankly speaking, the residences here can’t be regarded as houses. They are shacks with no sun and no sun. The per capita living area is only 2 to 3 square meters. On average, more than 1,400 people have one toilet (another saying is tens of thousands of people have one toilet), Flies are flying around, mice are running around, and various infectious diseases occur frequently.This slum is also the largest waste disposal site in Mumbai: I saw countless migrant workers (many of whom are child laborers and people of low caste) who put all kinds of waste plastics, waste computers, waste bottles, waste cans, and waste cardboard boxes one by one. After being sorted and reprocessed, these people do not have the minimum labor protection equipment such as gloves and masks, and even the furnace workers who incinerate scrap tin and iron sheets do not wear masks or glasses. Mr. S told me that most of the laborers here work 12 hours a day, with an average daily income of less than US$1, and they don’t rest on weekends, and they have to take care of their own food.

There are many NGOs in the slums of Mumbai, some of them sincerely do good things for the poor, such as running schools, practicing medicine, etc., but the other part is the mafia organization, which dominates the slums and even controls the water supply (there are only 3 NGOs in this slum every day. hourly running water supply), electricity supply (often blackouts), and collusion with politicians, making the slums of Mumbai a stable vote for some politicians. Blood and sweat labor, child labor slaves, and tyrannical gangsters, all these happened not in the backcountry of India, but here, in the economic, financial and cultural center of India, in the "Shanghai of India", in broad daylight.In this so-called largest democratic country in the world, people seem to have become numb to such things. There are probably three reasons: first, there are too many such things, and the law does not punish the public, so everyone turns a blind eye; second, the laborers here Most of them belong to low castes, and people of other castes seldom care about their fate; third, many government departments and officials here are corrupt and have been bought by employers long ago.

I asked Mr. S what the government has done to solve the slums?He told me that in 1995, the government formulated a plan to renovate 900,000 slum "housings" in Mumbai within five years. The living area is 21 square meters).I was afraid that I had heard it wrong, so I asked him again, and he simply wrote the sentence in my notebook with a pen.In the book "China Touches the World", I once wrote about my impressions of visiting India in the past: "You can drive from the center of Beijing or Shanghai, and drive in any direction, as long as you don't drive into the sea or cross the border. If you drive for 20 hours, you will see a lot of rural areas and cities. If you add up the poverty you see along the way, it may be less than if you drive from the center of Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata in India to the outside of the city. The poverty seen in hours. These Indian cities and their surrounding areas are still relatively developed areas in India, but you can still see the kind of abject poverty that has disappeared in most parts of China from time to time: large tracts of land where hundreds of thousands of people live Slums, the kind of abject poverty with ragged clothes and homeless people. Through three decades of reform and opening up, the number of abject poverty in China has dropped significantly, while India is far from achieving this.” After this visit to India, I think these words There is no need to change a single word.

There are a large number of politicians in India who are good at empty talk. They always write empty promises to voters indiscriminately during the campaign. They say "let the world forget about Shanghai in five years and only talk about Mumbai". It cannot reach the level of Shanghai today.Frankly speaking, in this most developed city in India, the living conditions of half of the residents today are not as good as most of the rural areas in China, not as good as our simple houses in the Wenchuan earthquake-stricken area. I really don’t know how Mumbai can catch up with Shanghai. I really don’t know India. How to catch up with China.India has made considerable progress in software, service outsourcing, pharmaceuticals and other industries in the past few years, which shows that India does have huge development potential, and China can learn from certain aspects of experience, but the employment opportunities created so far in these industries are limited , India's population growth is fast, and India is therefore unable to solve the problem of extreme poverty that has plagued itself for a long time.

Some people in China advocate learning from India’s democracy, and even from India’s slums, thinking that this is respect for human rights. I really want to suggest that these people go to the slums in developed areas of India for a day or two to experience the actual living conditions of the working people in India. Find out what is "Untouchable", what is "Rolling Dragon", what is "darkness" life, what is "child slave", what is "underworld democracy", what is "no minimum dignity and human rights".In fact, a country's level of economic and cultural development is often like an iron ruler, regulating the level of a country's civil society.Such a poor level of development in India is also an important reason for the poor quality of Indian civil society.

I know some Chinese scholars believe that China's gap between rich and poor exceeds that of India, and they cite the Bank of Asia's figure that China's Gini coefficient exceeds that of India.The widening gap between the rich and the poor in China is a fact that needs to be dealt with very seriously, but the gap between the rich and the poor in India is indeed far greater than that in China.As I said earlier, the Gini coefficient only calculates the income gap between people, not whether a person actually owns land, private houses, etc. Most of China's migrant workers have their own or relatives' land and private houses in their hometowns.India, like most developing countries, has never carried out land reform in the true sense. A large proportion of farmers have no tiles on the roof and no land to stand on. Once they flow into the cities, the slums are their "paradise".I hope that those who are interested in studying the gap between the rich and the poor in China will also take into account assets such as land and private houses, and then make some more convincing comparisons.

"Do the slums have anything to do with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai?" I asked a senior editor of an Indian newspaper, and he said to me without hesitation: "Of course there is. We have a Somalia in Mumbai. The Muslim population in Mumbai is There are more than 2 million Muslims, but most of the Muslims are poor, living in slums, the unemployment rate among young people is extremely high, there is a market for religious extremism here, many people are engaged in drug trafficking, and they have bought off the police and officials in Mumbai. Muslim terrorists should cooperate internally and externally." I don't know if this analysis is accurate, but at least half of the Indian scholars I met agreed with it. India has produced some world-class entrepreneurs and scientists, and most of the Indian students I have taught are also very good. Even in the slums of Mumbai, where the conditions are so harsh, I can feel that the working people at the bottom of India are working hard to change their lives. , I have no doubts about India's ultimate rise, but the premise is that India needs to wake up and realize that unless India carries out large-scale reforms and innovations in its own political system, it will be difficult for India to truly rise.It is a pity that many Indian officials and scholars have been blown away by the worthless praise from the West. They really think that India has a political system that is superior to China and will soon surpass China in all aspects.I have come to the exact opposite conclusion that all problems in India today are related to its poor political system.Due to this system, India cannot effectively solve the problem of India's "caste system", especially the 160 million untouchables who cannot be truly liberated; nor can it effectively solve a series of issues such as women's liberation, land reform, rural poverty, urban slums, and the threat of terrorism question.If these basic problems are not resolved, how can India rise?How can the gap between India and China be narrowed? During my visit to India this time, Indian friends and I talked about the terrorist attack in Mumbai the most. For the first time, I felt that so many Indians felt powerless, because this crisis exposed too many problems in India.The police do not live up to expectations, the intelligence system does not live up to it, the government departments do not live up to it, and officials do not live up to it. India is one of the countries that have suffered the most terrorist attacks in the world. Taking Mumbai as an example, since 2002, there have been large-scale terrorist attacks almost every year. In the summer of 2006, there was a big explosion on the urban railway running from north to south of Mumbai, killing more than 200 people.But by 2008, the awareness of terrorism prevention in India was still weak. After the terrorist attack in November 2008, it took India's elite counter-terrorism force nine hours to arrive at the scene of the attack.I was lecturing at Jawaharlal Nehru University and discussing China's development model with Indian scholars. An Indian scholar asked me: If China encounters such a terrorist attack, how will it respond?I said that China has not encountered such a large-scale terrorist attack so far, so it is hard to say, but I can talk about one thing: In May 2008, a huge earthquake occurred in Wenchuan, China. The epicenter was in the mountainous area of ​​central China, far away from the country. The economic and financial center, but our army activated the disaster relief mechanism within 20 minutes, our prime minister sat on the plane to the disaster area within 2 hours, and our medical team covered all 1 More than 1,000 disaster-stricken villages and towns, and directly helped more than 20 million victims of disasters.Another scholar asked: "Are you trying to prove that 'dictatorship' is more efficient than 'democracy'?" I said, "It's not that 'dictatorship' is more efficient than 'democracy', but that 'good governance' is better than 'bad governance'." It is more efficient. The relative success of the Chinese model shows that no matter what the political system is, it must be implemented in the end with "good governance", which is what the Chinese say is "people-oriented" and "governance with hard work". "Good governance" can be Western political Institutions, such as Switzerland, can also be non-Western political systems, such as Singapore, although China is deficient in this respect, it is far better than most developing countries; 'bad governance' can be Western political systems, such as Haiti, Iraq, the Philippines, Congo, Georgia, or non-Western political systems, such as Myanmar." After I answered, there was a silence in the conference hall, and the chairman of the conference said, "It seems that we Indians are also reflecting."