It has been a hazardous week for Chinese moguls. Last Friday, in Wuhan in central China, another Chinese executive, the 44-year-old Xu Ming, ranked by Forbes in 2005 as China’s eighth-richest person, was found dead in his prison cell, with Chinese news reports saying he died of a heart attack. His body was cremated the next day. It isn’t known whether an autopsy was performed.
The United States worries that China will use the bank to set the global economic agenda on its own terms, forgoing the environmental protections, human rights, anticorruption measures and other governance standards long promoted by its Western counterparts. American officials point to China’s existing record of loans to unstable governments, construction deals for unnecessary infrastructure, and villagers abruptly uprooted with little compensation.
.. China is taking direct aim at the current development regime, the Bretton Woods system established under the leadership of the United States after World War II to help stabilize currencies and promote growth.
Beijing officials say they want to take a faster approach than their counterparts at theWorld Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. The new bank, China promises, will not be bogged down in oversight.
.. A newly assertive Beijing felt that it had been unfairly treated for years by the United States. President Obama did not invite China to join the American-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, insisting that Beijing should not be allowed to write the rules for 21st-century commerce.
.. Yet Congress blocked an I.M.F. proposal, backed by the Obama administration, to make China the third-most-powerful country at the fund after the United States and Japan.
.. By early 2015, Britain was trying to claw its way out of the doghouse by adopting a mercantilist approach to China.
As a practical matter, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted London to be a prime center for trading in the renminbi. He also thought that Chinese investment was paramount for the nation’s health.
.. A deeper relationship with China is already paying dividends. During a four-day state visit by Mr. Xi to Britain in October, the two countries signed commercial agreements worth 40 billion pounds, or about $60 billion, including one for a major stake in the British nuclear industry. Mr. Osborne said Mr. Xi’s visit had ushered in a “golden era” between the two countries.
.. Still, concerns remain. The new bank, for example, is deciding whether it will give the go-ahead for highly polluting coal-fired power plants, which the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have effectively stopped financing.
Mr. Jin suggested that the bank might make exceptions for poor places where people have no access to power. “Do you leave these people in the dark? It’s a human rights issue,” he said.
“Being tall is seen as [being] better educated, being a good marriage partner, and so on,” said Morgan, the dean of social sciences at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
.. “If you look around any workplace in China,” Morgan told me, “jobs of different status are likely to be associated with people of different height.” At construction sites, for example, “all the guys wearing red helmets”—supervisors and engineers—“will be much taller on average than those in blue helmets”—migrant workers.
.. In 2013, almost seven million students graduated from institutions of higher education, but only 33.6 percent of Beijing college graduates signed employment contracts. This year, McKinsey released a report, revealed that except for “an elite minority, starting salaries will be flat yet again, at levels less than the income level of a full-time taxi driver.”
I was reminded of that grade-school experiment when, in recent weeks, I’ve read about China’s plans for a social-credit system, or S.C.S., that aims to compile a comprehensive national database out of citizens’ fiscal, government, and possibly personal information. First publicized, last year, in a planning document published by the State Council, S.C.S. was billed as “an important component part of the Socialist market-economy system,” underwriting a “harmonious Socialist society.” Its intended goals are “establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues,” and its primary objectives are to raise “the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society” as well as “the over-all competitiveness of the country,” and “stimulating the development of society and the progress of civilization.” Or, as it seemed to me, Stars of China, writ large.
.. The opacity of its infrastructure is disquieting. What safeguards will be put in place to prevent the database from being rigged? Will the very corruption that the social-credit system is meant to counter infect the system itself? Who will oversee the overseers of the operation? How will privacy, long under siege in contemporary China, be protected? And will punishment for political discontent be delivered through dismal credit scores? If S.C.S. becomes a mechanism of financial and social integration, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid becoming an instrument of mass surveillance.