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Prospects
An iconic billboard in the quintessential boom city of Shenzhen features Deng’s famous statement that China's “basic line will not waver for 100 years.” If Deng was right, we are less than one-third of the way into the era of “reform and opening.” But four challenges identified by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, that growth becomes “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, or unsustainable,” threaten the boom. The key to balance lies in increasing the consumer share of GDP, allowing China to create a modern consumer economy. Stability will depend on the government's ability to address grievances as the gap between winners and losers widens. Coordination is the great test facing the ruling Communist Party, of whether it can manage the politics of growth without fundamental changes to the system. Sustainability is an issue that has global implications, as citizens of a warming planet watch anxiously to see if China is successful in greening the boom. The fifth great challenge, left out by Premier Wen, may be the external one: whether the world is successful in making room for China. |
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Visit to an American SupermarketPeriod: Prospects
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Click to expand Since I watched Chinese leaders close by, I saw Mao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. In 1971, when I came to New York, I went to a supermarket. I was overwhelmed. It was such an affluent society. At the time, China was living under very strict rationing. If you bought anything, you needed a coupon. Rice, cooking oil, meats, textiles, this was a huge difference, a huge gap. I told myself that never in my life time would I see Chinese supermarkets that were as good as America’s. More than 30 years later, I realized I was wrong. At that time, I was pretty convinced that Chinese supermarkets would never, in my lifetime, look like American supermarkets. I thought that because we have a very large population, the American population is relatively much smaller and, also, America started industrialization much earlier and China was catching up. Today, when you are in Chinese supermarket, you do not feel much difference.
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