Consumption is patriotic
Officials in one of the world’s largest countries are telling citizens to shop-till-you-drop for the good of the nation. Buying personal big-ticket items is patriotic. Which country could that be?
It’s the world’s largest country: China. From a report in the Shanghai Daily:
“Buy an apartment, and you are patriotic,” says a local Chinese official in her bizarre call to beggar the poor to bail out housing speculators.
Wang Aihua shocked the nation with her bold statement last Monday, delivered live on a local TV station in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province. Wang is the director of the city’s urban planning bureau.
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Last Tuesday, one day after Wang’s buy-a-condo plea, Li Zhe, a member of the Beijing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said: “I suggest patriotic consumption. Everyone and every institution should spend what they make in one year just on consumption.”How about two years’ income? How about your life’s savings? It seems that the one-year figure came to his mind as a passing whim.
In a column defending the concept of patriotic consumption, two Chinese economists cite Marx in support:
Consumption is an inherent requirement of economic development and is crucial for the national economy. Marx pointed out, “Production is thus at the same time consumption, and consumption is at the same time production….Without production there is no consumption, but without consumption there is no production either, since in that case production would be useless.” On the one hand, only through consumption do products thus produced become real commodities, and only through consumption can commodities realize their value. On the other, consumption can generate new demand and new motivations for production.
We elevate consumption to the level of patriotism because broadening consumption is particularly important for China’s economic development right now.
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Active consumption is patriotic, and loving your country means loving yourself. If demand is insufficient, the economy will remain sluggish, commodities will not sell, and businesses conditions will inevitably deteriorate, leading to a risk of salary reductions or unemployment. In response to the financial crisis that is sweeping the globe, Premier Wen Jiabao said that confidence is more important than gold or currencies. For each individual consumer, having confidence in consumption is actually having confidence in the country’s future, and having confidence in their own future. [foonote omitted]
Consumer confidence will save the economy? Sounds more like Keynes than Marx to me.
h/t: Global Voices