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.
Chinese People Do Not Want Another Period of Chaos
Edward Tse is senior partner and chairman for Greater China for consulting firm Booz & Company (Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei). He has over 20 years of management consulting and senior corporate management experience and is widely known as one of the pioneers in China’s management consulting profession.
Dr. Tse has held a number of leadership positions ranging from being managing partner, China for the Boston Consulting Group, to being a member of the Consultative Editorial Board of Harvard Business Review Chinese Edition. A recognized thought leader, Dr. Tse has authored numerous articles and is author of two books: Direction – What Chinese Enterprises Should Learn (in Chinese; Winter 2007) and The China Strategy – Harnessing the Power of the World’s Fastest-Growing Economy (Spring 2010).
Dr. Tse holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley where he received the Converse Prize for being the most outstanding graduate student. He also has a MS and BS in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What the communists brought to China was the so called planned economy system, everything was top down, they designed everything. You know, it was this organization, this organization, everything sort of followed a certain way. That, of course, turned out to be not very effective as we know, as I mentioned about the Cultural Revolution and so on. But the remnants of this planned economy, even with economic reform was very effective in directing the development of the whole country.
It was very effective in directing the resources to where the country actually needed. So the combination of the official China which is a top down mechanism to try to direct the development of the country, plus the allowance on a grassroots level of entrepreneurism, what I call entrepreneurial China in my book. This combination turned out to be very unique and it is very, very effective, very powerful, in driving the development of China during the last, as you mentioned, couple of decades and GDP growth of, let's say, 10% every year, in my opinion, is a direct result of this very unique model.
But, the funny thing is, the Chinese actually did not design it, the Chinese just happened to fall into it, because of history. But it turned out to be very effective and I believe this model will continue to drive the very fast growth of the Chinese economy over the next decade or even more.
The 175 years, or so, of troubled history actually have also, has a deep impact in the hearts of the Chinese. In fact, this has actually driven a deep sense of nationalism within all of the Chinese and the Chinese do recognize that this last 30 years of relatively good performance of the country is something that… it didn't come easy. It's not like this is God given thing to the Chinese, the Chinese had to fight, had to work on it pretty hard actually. And if you look at recent history, this is really the only time where China has had a reasonably stable environment and, of course, a pretty good economic performance.
So, for many of the Chinese, they do recognize that this is a period that everyone needs to treasure. It's not like, "Hey, we screw up then next time it's gong to be very easy." I think a lot of people do recognize that if we screw up this time, it will take a long time for the Chinese to come back, because we've seen it in our recent history, many many times of foresight.
And, so, for the Chinese, in particular, the Chinese government, they're actually quite cautious about the path forward. Cautious from the standpoint of, number one, stability is important because you know, we have had so much chaos in the last 170 years or so and having another period of chaos certainly isn't to the interest of the Chinese people. Number two is, the model that I mentioned, the unique combination of a top-down official China and then the allowance of a grassroots level entrepreneurial China.
That model, this so called "China model" has worked in the last 30 years. In my opinion, it probably will work for the next decade or maybe even two decades, but, as all things, nothing is going to be stagnant, things are going to be changing.
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