Produced by:
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Program::
Air date:
Mon, 01/11/2016 - 12:00am
Richard Smith with Bill Resnick on China's economic and environmental problems
Bill Resnick talks with China scholar Richard Smith regarding China's economic and environmental problems. Smith's writing is available on Truthout , including his article on China's Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse. They discuss the recent crisis in China's economy, and Smith notes the coexistence of capitalist enterprises the larger state sector, and how China has the worst of both market and bureaucratic economies: as a bureaucratic collectivist capitalist economy, China faces structural pressures to keep the economy going despite drastic consequences for the environment, and despite environmental laws. Having built an economy on superexploitation or "police state capitalism," the government has more recently made concessions to the massive protests by workers in the last ten years, propping up a system of overproduction to maintain employment and raise wages. Producing things they dont need--whether junk for export or ghost cities --energy is expended to keep the extractive economy (rather than life) going on. Although China is the world's largest producer of solar panels, it lacks the grid to put renewable energy to wide use.
[image via wikimedia]
![[image via wikimedia]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_Emblem_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China.svg){kind=link}
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