Why are we not rioting? Part 2 — Asia

“Why are we not rioting?” was the question asked on Feb. 3 in this blog column, when it took a look at not-so-random acts of outrage brought about by the economic free fall in Europe and several developing nations. While the 10 days since that post haven’t shook the world, Asia is getting pretty shaky, particularly Vietnam and Korea, writes University of the Philippines sociology professor Walden Bello in “Asia: The Coming Fury“, published by Foreign Policy in Focus. The problem: Broke Americans stopped buying exports from an Asian economy built over three decades on our demand.

Here’s the situation as Bello sees it:

The sudden end of the export era is going to have some ugly consequences. In the last three decades, rapid growth reduced the number living below the poverty line in many countries. In practically all countries, however, income and wealth inequality increased. But the expansion of consumer purchasing power took much of the edge off social conflicts. Now, with the era of growth coming to an end, increasing poverty amid great inequalities will be a combustible combination.

In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label “mass group incidents,” which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.

The Financial Times fleshes out the numbers in China. Exports haven’t been as low as present levels in a decade, and imports are falling even faster, leading observers to wonder whether a government stimulus plan is working. (China, of course, is the likely source of money the United States will borrow to fund its own stimulus plan.)

The prospects for mass civil unrest are slight in repressive China, but the FT says “authorities would face enormous domestic political opposition if they tried to appreciate [revalue] the renminbi,” the Chinese monetary unit that some say remains undervalued.

The tiny economy of impoverished Tajikistan, in Central Asia, hasn’t boomeranged as in Southeast Asia, but it’s still suffering, as money sent home from Tajiks working in the developed world slumps.

Meanwhile, Naomi Klein draws a line from Argentina’s economic crisis early in this decade to the current situation in Iceland and predicts a global backlash (including, yes, riots) against governments that impose free-market austerity programs when booms go bust.