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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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China is Like a Raft in Category 5 White WaterPeriod: Prospects
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Click to expand My model of China in the late 20th and early 21st century, the boom years, is essentially a raft going down a category 5 white water stream where there’s an infinite series of boulders and, at the last minute, they’ve kept missing them. So far, the biggest boulder they hit, of course, was Tiananmen Square in 1989, and that one set them back quite a bit. But since then, whether it’s been dealings with the United States, rural unrest, environmental disaster of the moment, they have dodged instant by instant, and at the last instant, the problems they’ve been facing. That is impressive to me if you compare it, for example, with Japan, where there was, for a while, the virtue of quite rigid and coherent and nation-wide system. But, I think, in the 90s they saw some of the drawbacks in that rigidity. So, the relative adaptability of a communist regime has been impressive. Then, just moving back a second, what I view, just thinking about it at this moment, as the "secret" of the Chinese success, is combining a successful part of the preceding East Asian model, which is forced savings, you know, industrial concentration, export growth and all the rest, and combining that with a certain latitude and allowance for chaos, of letting lots of the country essentially be ungoverned, letting people come in and make deals from around the world. So, the combination of control and anarchy, I think, both characterizes China as one observes it now and explains something about its boom.
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