Some fuzzy social science grabs the attention of China Daily:

No poverty and child labor; a life expectancy of above 80; everyone entitled
to medical insurance and unemployment benefits; and the lowest monthly salary
surpassing US$1300…

A dream you say? Well, that’s what a research paper is depicting what China
will look like in 2050.

China will undergo two social transformations before that year. The
transformation will lead to a complete change of Chinese people’s conventions
and lifestyle cultivated from 5000 year ago. Social interests and roles will be
totally reversed, according to a research paper released by a Chinese
modernization research center.

The paper said during the first stage of the 50-year span (2000-2050), China
is to transform from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and from a
rural society to an urban one. In the second stage, the country will go from an
industrial society into an information-based one and from an urban society to a
balanced urban-rural one with suburban characteristics.

     Sounds great, doesn’t it?  Too bad it’s just a mixture of warmed over modernization theory from the 1950’s ("with suburban characteristics") and the kind of vacuous optimism found in many a politcial stump speech ("everyone entitled to health insurance…")

UPDATE: HK Dave over at Simon’s World links to a
People’s Daily story I missed.  It seems China is 80 years behind the
West in terms of modernization.  80 years behind, but a utopia in 44
years: don’t you just love bad social science.

     When I first saw this, I thought it might be a CCP-inspired image of an ideal future created to distract attention away from the growing social discontent in the PRC today.  But it is just too light-weight for serious ideological work.  The short newspaper piece doesn’t even identify what organization published the "study."  All we hear of is a "Chinese modernization research center."   

FURTHUR UPDATE (2/10): Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian, does a fuller job in describing the report, which, it turns out, is from the Chinese Academy of Science, suggesting that it is supposed to be taken seriously as a vision of the bright socialist future.

    When Communists get serious about producing utopian images of the future to rationalize authoritarian politics of the present, they can be much more passionate.  My favorite is, of course, Marx’s own vision:

For as soon as the distribution of
labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of
activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He
is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must
remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in
communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity
but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do
one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I
have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or
critic.

     If we could get there without hurting anyone, which is what Eduard Bernstein was all about, I would happily call myself a Communist.  But we probably can’t, so I don’t.
   
     Taoists, too, have a utopian vision, one that is not used to rationalize an authoritarian politics (not even by the Legalists who appropriate Taoism: they are quite happy to focus on the necessities of power).  Here is the penultimate passage from the Tao Te Ching:

Let nations grow smaller and smaller
and people fewer and fewer,

let weapons become rare
and superfluous,
let people feel death’s gravity again
and never wander far from home.
Then boat and carriage will sit unused
and shield and sword lie unnoticed.

Let people knot ropes for notation again
and never need anything more,

let them find pleasure in their food
and beauty in their clothes,
peace in their homes
and joy in their ancestral ways.

Then people in neighboring nations will look across to each other,
their chickens and dogs calling back and forth,

and yet they’ll grow old and die
without bothering to exchange visits.

    It sounds a bit lonely and isolated, but peaceful and content.  And it would require the dissolution of the modern state.  Not quite likely in the PRC, or just about anywhere else, by 2050.