That's the suggestion from political commentator Adam Hanft. Writing in the Huffington Post, Hanft says Toyota is paying the price for pursuing growth for its own sake, and the same could happen to China.
Hanft writes: "China's rapid ascendancy carries with it a far greater risk of overstretch and structural weakness than Toyota's. China's problems are more pervasive and threatening than a sticky pedal, lumpy floor mats, or even electronic signaling issues. Bribery and institutionalized corruption have resulted in massive amounts of unsafe construction and inferior products. There is little or no operative regulatory structure. China barely has a functioning judiciary. Growth is raping its environment. The vast urban migration – the largest in history – has created profound tears in the country's fabric. And social unrest is being managed by showering capitalist bennies within an autocratic framework that still views the Internet as a threat. Toyota, it turns out, had many warnings, which it chose to ignore, to bundle up in bureaucratic wool. But even though China's warnings are far more visible – tainted milk, kids' toys as toxic as the chemical slick floating on Love Canal – they're seen more as manageable symptoms of hyper-development, rather than what they are: signals of a what will be a vast, deep and inevitable crisis."
Take a closer look and you will see the danger signals. Professor Yu Jianrong, the director of social issues research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Rural Affairs who advises Chinese leaders, has warned that the country is on the brink of revolutionary turmoil and that the Politburo's hard line policies will make it worse. He has cited statistics showing the number of recorded incidents of ''mass unrest'' grew from 8709 in 1993 to more than 90,000 in each of the past three years.
The violence that has seen nearly 200 people killed and 1600 injured in the attacks by Muslim minority Uighurs against members of China's dominant Han ethnic group are a taste of things to come.
At the same time, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is warning that the Chinese crime rate and social unrest will continue to rise this year. The other danger signal is the labour shortage in the Chinese market. It's forced up the wages of factory workers by as much as 20% and that will drive inflation. And if the prices of food and clothes are going, it's likely to create massive social unrest.
The problem for China is that that it leaders are caught in a vicious circle. The more they feel under threat from the Internet, inflation and social unrest from ethnic minorities, the harder they will clamp down, the worse the situation will become.
And because countries around the world are now relying on China as one of the few engines of growth, social turmoil in China should have everyone worried.
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