‘Emerging Powers’: Huzzahs for Capitalism

In its sometimes uneasy blend of solid journalism and huzzahs for capitalism in the Third World, the four-hour miniseries “Emerging Powers” has all the signs of being a product of Wall Street Journal Television, the business paper-of-record’s TV arm. The aim is to show what happens when the large potentials of China, India, Brazil and Mexico are unleashed from government-controlled restraints and let loose in the free market.

The unsurprising formula here is: socialism bad, free market good. The reality, though, is more complicated.

As each segment explores the contradictions of giant economies struggling against old traditions and finding new, inventive means for growth, patterns begin to emerge. Three of the four segments are hosted by TV journalists: Deborah Wang in China; Anita Ratnam in India; Pedro Bial in Brazil. Is it any accident that the best reporting is by the only host who’s a print journalist, Rossana Fuentes, business correspondent for the Mexico City-based Reforma? Or that while Wang, Ratnam and Bial sometimes sound like Chamber of Commerce spokespeople (Bial: “We are an optimistic people”), Fuentes confronts Mexico’s vexing economic problems head-on?

Of course, Mexico has had to face the harsh side of the freed-up market ever since 1994, when the peso’s value plummeted in the wake of NAFTA and government deregulation. China and India, especially, are just now tasting the fruits of profit, consumer goods and private wealth, and they want more. But Mexico’s lesson for China, India and Brazil is that the vaunted free market can be just as cruel as the worst kind of socialist red tape.

What Fuentes finds are poor and middle-class families barely surviving the whips of inflation, currency loss and recession--all at the same time, and just as the decades-long political structure is facing both revolts in Chiapas and reform efforts. The so-called “blessed years” of the go-go ‘80s are now looked upon nostalgically. A grass-roots project like a “poor people’s bank” in the community of Chalco is only a modest bid at boosting incomes, and bustling farm production in Sinaloa is critically hurt by a poor transportation system.

Fuentes shows the good and bad; her colleagues seem afraid of the bad, as if it would deter potential American customers watching the series. While Wang explains how the generation of new Chinese entrepreneurs were the students in Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution, the past is framed as a character-building episode, not as genocide. Though leading Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou is profiled here, his terrible, ongoing censorship struggles with the Chinese government are given scant mention.

So with Ratnam and Vial, who seem to go out of their way to avoid their nations’ still-massive poverty--a potential social powder keg as a new wealthy class emerges and the rich-poor gap grows. Yet even Indian shanty huts contain TVs--even if paying them off means having to go without food.

Too often here, American-style fashions and satellite dishes are reported as equaling quality of life. They could just as well mean that everyone is capable of getting sucked into the tube, regardless of language, custom or class.

That’s progress?

* “Emerging Powers” airs at 9 tonight (“China and India”) and Jan. 19 (“Brazil and Mexico”) on KCET-TV Channel 28.