China on a roll.
Going with what works. What a novel idea.
Antidote to the doomsayers in the West.
Experimental China
Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Fung Global Institute and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Xiao Geng, Director of Research at the Fung Global Institute
Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Fung Global Institute and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and is currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Xiao Geng, Director of Research at the Fung Global Institute
2 comments:
Pragmatic policy with long term goals aren't a feature of Democracy. If the US Government tried to promote a policy of prosperity and expansionism like China they would be accused of hegemony, destroying the environment and stoking regional wars.
Most western analysts that I read don't say China is going to collapse just that their rate of growth will slow and that their private credit boom had to end and that their population curve looks difficult in the years ahead to maintain positive growth at all. We now get a glimpse of how they are solving each of those problems, which in typical Chinese style, is with good centrally planned policy driven by the communist party unity.
The two party government in the United States by contrast can't match their performance because their goal isn't to promote increased standards of living or any such thing. You can't really compare a competent figure like Xi with Obama. The US politician doesn't have a goal, a strategy or any sort of purpose besides getting elected and then re-elected while delivering policy to their $upporters that gets them re-elected. The parties are designed to oppose one another but never actually create a policy stance that is independent of the opposition and in the broad public interest. Obama represented "Change that we can believe in" while Bush was "A Safer World and a More Hopeful America." Xi drove a crack down on pollution--shutting down industries that couldn't or wouldn't comply, a massive crack down on corruption, a new round of privatization, opening capital markets, creating a FDIC type banking regulator/insurance scheme, modernizing military, promoting use of the yuan... all sorts of broad policies that are part of an overall plan created by the party. Obama in his second term ended the war in afghanistan, worked on trade agreements and, pretty much failed to enact his other campaign promises to make stricter gun laws, immigration reform, universal pre-K, and raise the minimum wage because the parties in congress didn't share those goals.
Right. China not only has a policy it is based on a vision of where the leadership wants to take the country, and it's a vision that the people largely agree with because they see it in their families' long term interest. Things have gotten better for most Chinese since 1949 and for many, it is a whole lot better. Few are worse off, since China had been a mess for a century, poor, oppressed and war-torn.
While many Chinese would like to have more freedom, they value stability and order more highly and they understand the vision of long term progress that has been unfolding on five-year plans. The CCP understands the ancient Chinese principle about having the mandate of heaven in order to govern.
One of the big problems China faces now in addition to corruption is inequality. This is a big deal in China, since the Revolution was supposed to end this age-old issue of class that resulted in oppression of the masses in the interest of rentiers. Especially significant now is dynastic wealth, which further underscores a return to the past that the Chinese people thought they had escaped. They see how in the West the liberal revolutions were captured by the wealthy so that inequality and oppression continued under a new ruling class. They don't want to lose the gains of their hard-fought revolutions. BTW, there is even a name for second-generation rich kids, in particular those that act like spoiled brats. Search on "fuerdai." Xi himself is now addressing the issue before it result in a backlash.
China's challenge now is a balancing act between the market and socialism, which is the same old issue of reconciling the trifecta of social liberalism, political liberalism, and economic liberalism within the context of order, which is a sine qua non of a highly functional society. The polarity on the axis of order is authoritarianism and libertarianism. The other axis on this grid is the polarity between the market and socialism. That's pretty much the political compass in the PRC. Those falling in the market-libertarian quadrant are the Western-oreinted liberalizers, while those falling in the authoritarian socialist quadrant are the CCP Maoist ideologues and the PLA. The majority of people fall in one of the other quadrants. The government aims at the center to the degree possible to maintain order and stick to the policy as determined by the vision.
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