What Xi Jinping thinks about development economics — Andrew Batson

Must-read.

Note: Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer.

Andrew Batson's Blog
What Xi Jinping thinks about development economics

Andrew Batson

Branko Milanovic — Hayekian communism

"Hayekian communism" an oxymoron? Branko Milanovic says not at all.

Global Inequality
Hayekian communismBranko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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After amply discussing income inequality in Europe and the US, economists are now looking at the magnitude, implications and possible remedies for this phenomenon in the context of the Chinese economy....

Bruegel
Inequality in China

Sylvia Merler

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Compared with many world powers, including Russia, China still needs to learn and accumulate experience in dealing with global issues. In this sense, this trade war also teaches the Chinese a very good lesson.

Valdai Club
Benefits of the US-China Trade War
Feng Shaole

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The world crossed a geopolitical watershed at the end of 2017. That was when the American Empire officially declared China its No.1 national-security threat, alongside Russia.

Since then, Washington has spared no effort to confront and contain China on multiple fronts. These include an intensifying trade war, bans on Chinese acquisitions of US assets, a witch-hunt against Chinese companies and individuals in America, military and political provocations in the South China Sea and relating to Taiwan, and whipping up Sinophobic activity among US allies (translation: vassals). And playing a key role in fanning and marketing these efforts, as usual, are the Western corporate media....

Counterpunch
Xinjiang : The New Great Game

Thomas Hon Wing Polin – Gerry Brown

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Trade tensions between the US and China could drag on for decades but China's focus on its Belt and Road Initiative could provide relief

Asia Times
Here comes the 30-year trade war
Pepe Escobar

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Sputnik International
US Reportedly Plans to Roll Out Secret Multifaceted Anti-China Plan

Also

Zero Hedge

China Publishes Massive "White Paper" Explaining Beijing's Position On Trade War

Tyler Durden

Also

Ecns
White paper clarifies 6 key facts about China-U.S. trade, economic ties

Xinhua

Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng — How Cities Are Saving China

China is finding its way alone as new type of socio-economic system on the scene that also has to interact with the current world order. It's doing all right, and even great as far as development economics goes.

Project Syndicate
How Cities Are Saving China

Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing; and Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, and a professor at Peking University HSBC Business School and the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Business and Economics

Zhou Xiaochuan — The opening-up of Chinese economy - from manufacturing industry to service industry

Keynote speech by Mr Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People's Bank of China, at the 2017 Lujiazui Forum "Financial reform and steady development from a global perspective", Shanghai, 21 June 2017.

Bank of International Settlements
Zhou Xiaochuan: The opening-up of Chinese economy - from manufacturing industry to service industry
Keynote speech by Mr Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor of the People's Bank of China, at the 2017 Lujiazui Forum "Financial reform and steady development from a global perspective", Shanghai, 21 June 2017.

David Lane — Why market socialism is a viable alternative to neoliberalism

The key idea, according to British political scientists such as Julian Le Grand and David Miller, is that market socialism retains the market mechanism while socializing the ownership of capital. The thrust of this social-democratic approach is that markets not only promote efficiency but also freedom and democracy thus giving wide political appeal.

London School of Economics Blog

Why market socialism is a viable alternative to neoliberalism

David Lane | previously Professor of Sociology at Birmingham University and currently Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University

Adair Turner — China vs. the Washington Consensus

Neoliberalism versus market socialism with Chinese characteristics. Which wins?

Since Deng introduced market socialism, China has been kicking butt in terms of growth rate, defying neoliberal predictions, while neoliberal economies have been mired since the 2008 crisis.

What's up with that? Adair Turner explains.

What is overlooks, however, is the history of the US, which adopted the American System over the British system as a result of Alexander Hamilton's influence and followed up with the National System of Friedrich List. 

China is following a similar path while hewing one that is suitable for the conditions that China faces. Seems to be working just like — like the US after the founding. Surprise.

Turner appears to be in the right ball park in contrast to most Western economists analyzing China, but even he seems to miss the obvious point that the huge and "potentially bad" debt extended by the state to state owned countries is actually public investment and that the only constraints are availability of real resources and inflation, neither of which presents any serious issues at present. Hand-wringing over this debt is comparable to hand-wriging over the size of the public debt of the US or Japan. It's irrelevant.

Project Syndicate
China vs. the Washington Consensus

Adair Turner

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China’s Contradictions
Stephen S. Roach

Reuters — China's Xi says study capitalism, but Marxism remains top

Communist Party members should study contemporary capitalism but must never deviate from Marxism, Chinese President Xi Jinping said...

“If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our party would lose its soul and direction,” Xi said. “On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”

Xi said the party should better integrate the basic tenets of Marxism with the “reality of contemporary China and learn from the achievements of other civilizations to create and develop Marxism”, Xinhua said.

“Xi also asked Party members to study contemporary capitalism, its essence and patterns,” the report added....

Reuters

China's Xi says study capitalism, but Marxism remains top

Relentless efforts should be made to adapt Marxism to China, to the era and to the public, President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said on Friday.…

Xi said that as a party upholding Marxism, the CPC should make sure its theories keep up with the times.

Drifting away from or betraying Marxism will lead to the Party's losing its soul and direction as it moves forward, Xi added.

Marxism is unsurpassed in achieving great heights and having a huge influence, he said....

Since China has undergone remarkable changes following its reform and opening-up, Chinese are most qualified and capable of unveiling the lessons and natural laws behind such changes and of making original contributions to the development of Marxism, Xi said.

Party members should be self-conscious about and confident in the theory, focus on what they do, listen to what the people think, respond to actual needs and fully sum up the practices of socialism with Chinese characteristics, Xi said.

Additionally, the Party should continue improving its capabilities in analyzing and tackling issues by using Marxism, and continue strengthening its capabilities in addressing major challenges, risks, resistance and contradictions, he said.

Ecns

Adapting Marxism called crucial
China Daily

Supercomupters.

Ecns
Amazing Chinese “brain”

Daniel Little — Erik Olin Wright on real utopias

Erik Olin Wright is one of the genuinely important contributors to a progressive sociology in the United States. He was one of the first wave of social scientists and philosophers who created the movement of analytical Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s, and for more than thirty years he has organized much of his own thinking and the collaborations of a number of other scholars around the idea of a "real utopia." Essentially the idea is to make use of good social science research and theory to help to formulate visions of the future of society that incorporate an emancipatory vision of human community while imagining institutions and social arrangements that are feasible and attainable. Erik's book Envisioning Real Utopias provides a manifesto and extensive development of the ideas (link).

The general perspective that Wright has taken in the Real Utopias project is egalitarian and emancipatory. The project has focused on a number of key topics: universal basic income, market socialism, deliberative democracy, alternatives to capitalism, and gender equality, to name just a few. (Earlier posts on UnderstandingSociety have highlighted some of the goals of the real utopias project (link, link). Erik's webpage provides more details….

Understanding Society
Erik Olin Wright on real utopiasDaniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Adam Garrie — President Xi rejects western political models in speech praising Chinese traditions

Forewarned is forearmed. Xi is determined not to fall into the same trap as Gorbachev.

Expect to see more push back against rules dictated by the West and especially the US.

Chinese people in general have a strong preference for stability and harmony. Individualism, which is the foundation of Western liberalism, is foreign to them.

The Duran
President Xi rejects western political models in speech praising Chinese traditions
Adam Garrie

Xinhua — China's wealthiest village returns to rice farming

Human interest story.

Ecns
China's wealthiest village returns to rice farming

Xinhua

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Huaxi Village

Pictures. Not exactly what we would call a village. I guess the Chinese do things big.

Sora News 24
These photos from the ‘richest village in China’ will positively blow you away
Krista Rogers

Here's a video in English.

David Stanway — Heralding Social, Financial Change, China Aims Blow At Iron Rice Bowl

This is earthshaking change for China. The leadership has to be very confident in "market socialism" to undertake it. It's like cutting Social Security and Medicare in the US, only bigger, since the "iron rice bowl" is cradle to grave.

Reuters
Heralding Social, Financial Change, China Aims Blow At Iron Rice Bowl

David Stanway

Graham E. Fuller — Democracy, the “Great Debates,” and China

Graham Fuller talks some sense.

Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. It’s interesting that China today is actually quietly touting to the rest of the world its own evolving system. Of course we recoil from the terrible catastrophes of Chinese regimes over most of the past century. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that China has been concerned with principles of good governance going back some three thousand years, including Confucian principles of the responsibility of “cultivated” or educated people to govern wisely; that was probably as good as it got in that era. More important, the state bureaucracy was selected through massive nation-wide examination systems to choose the most qualified. The system had its good periods and bad, almost on a 300 year cyclical basis—breakdown and restoration.
Today China is creeping back again, this time from the disasters of Chairman Mao towards a semblance of order and rationality in governance. It has implemented a series of often unusually effective policies that are slowly bringing an ever rising percent of the rural and urban poor into the middle class and a slightly freer life.

Now, I don’t want to live in China particularly. But consider the daunting challenges of running this country: one that was left behind in the last century or so, invaded by English and Japanese imperialists, massively misruled under fanatic communists (not all were fanatic) for fifty years, and now presides over a population approaching 1.4 billion people. China’s leaders operate on the razor’s edge: meeting pent-up demand after decades of deprivation, managing the transition of millions of peasants who want to come to the cities, feeding and housing everyone, maintaining industrial production while trying to reverse the terrible environmental damage wrought in earlier decades, to maintain stability, law and order while managing discontent that could turn violent, and to maintain the present ruling party in power to which there is no reasonable alternative as yet. That’s quite a high-wire act.

So if you were running China today, what would you advocate as the best policies and system to adopt? Chances are few of us would simply urge huge new infusions of democracy and rampant capitalism. The delicate balance of this frail recovering system needs to be guided with care. But it is basically working—as opposed to looming alternatives of chaos and poverty.

China today suggests to developing countries that China’s own model of controlled cautious light authoritarian leadership—where leaders are groomed over decades up through the ranks of the party— may be a more reliable system than, say, the bread and circuses of the US. That’s their view.

No one system has all the answers. But it’s worth observing that by now the US probably lies at one extreme of a political spectrum of bread-and-circus “democracy.” Can the system be reformed? Ever more serious questions arise about the present system’s ability to meet the challenge of this century—along multiple lines of measurements.

And, as world gets more complex, there is less room for radical individualism, whistle blowing, and dissent. Vital and complex infrastructural networks grow ever more vulnerable that can bring a state down. The state moves to protect itself. The strengthening of the state against the individual has already shifted heavily since the Global War on Terror and even more so under Obama.

I’m not suggesting that China is the model to be emulated. But we better note how it represents one rational vision of functioning governance of the future—under difficult circumstances—at one end of the spectrum. The US lies at the other. Is there anything that might lie somewhere between these two highly diverse systems of governance?

Just sayin’.

In the spirit of disclosure, this is a view that I have espoused previously so I am biased in its favor. I am happy to see someone "on the other side of the fence" putting it forward for consideration in the policy establishment.

Democracy, the “Great Debates,” and China

Graham E. Fuller, former senior CIA official

Dan Steinbock — “Four Comprehensives” Vital to Progress, and China’s Demographic Future

At the recently concluded Fifth Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, the “Four Comprehensives” became the grand blueprint for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Each of the four tasks requires broad measures and pragmatic actions.

1. A moderately prosperous society
2. Structural reforms
3. Rule of law
4. Strict party discipline

Economonitor
“Four Comprehensives” Vital to Progress

In the West, one-child policy is often criticized as a “cruel Communist strategy.” In reality, most opponents of that policy were Marxists and the idea itself came from the West.

China’s Demographic Future

Dan Steinbock

Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng — Experimental China

China on a roll. 

Going with what works. What a novel idea. 

Antidote to the doomsayers in the West.

Project Syndicate

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

Caleb Maupin — Who’s Afraid of Xi Jinping? And Why?

Why are the primary voices of US capitalist opinion in such an uproar? Why do they so greatly fear that the leader of the People’s Republic of China may revive anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiments that once defined Chinese politics? 

The implications of such a reality, if it is indeed true, are huge. China is the center of world industrial production. It has a rapidly growing and globally connected economy, with worldwide relationships that are beyond calculation. If China is indeed having a revival of Marxist-Leninist ideology and Mao Zedong Thought, this is no laughing matter for all who take world events seriously. If China is once again going down the revolutionary road, the centers of finance, the Pentagon, and the very global role of the United States are all now facing a bigger threat than ever. 

Just as the halls of power echoed with “Who lost China?” in 1949, the recent declarations of the capitalist press indicate that they are undoubtedly now echoing with “Who lost China, again?” and “Why didn’t we see this coming?”…

New Eastern Outlook
Who’s Afraid of Xi Jinping? And Why?

Caleb Maupin

Lara Farrar — Among China’s students, some hope for a return to Mao-era policies

Students at Fudan University in Shanghai ride past a statue of Mao Zedong located on campus. Chinese academics say more young people are embracing Maoism as a backlash against deepening social inequality

On the campus of Beijing Normal University, professors say they’ve noticed a trend that worries them: students embracing radical leftism. They advocate a return to the socialist state that Communist Party founder Mao Zedong favored and that Chinese leaders for the last generation have tried to put behind them.

The students wear pins with pictures of Mao and carry bags with the former Communist leader’s famous quotations, such as “serve the people.”...

“The new leftists and the neo-liberals, they hate each other,” said Lu Xinyu, a left-leaning professor in Fudan University’s journalism school. “There are a lot of lies told by neo-liberals. A very significant characteristic of them is to always see America as a kind of utopia and that China should meet that standard, but America is facing a serious crisis.”

McClatchy
Among China’s students, some hope for a return to Mao-era policies
Lara Farrar | McClatchy Foreign Staff