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Dynamic economy derives from dynamic debating
Frank Woosoo Updated: 2005-08-17 11:20
It is politically healthy for a rapidly growing China to debate on different
courses where it had better choose for development. A dynamic economy derives
from a dynamic discussion by the top leaders and their advisors, which shines
the grain of democracy .
The world's attention has been focused on China in July because of the
aborted bid by China National Offshore Oil Corp to take over the American
company Unocal, and the sudden unpeg of China's currency, the yuan to the
dollar, on July 21. But three other recent developments are much more important,
because they provide subtle signals that a major debate has started within the
Beijing leadership on China's social, economic, cultural and political future.
On July 28, the People's Daily ran a front-page editorial calling on
citizens to obey the law, saying that any threats to social stability would not
be tolerated. This editorial could have been aimed to deter anti-Japanese
protests in the period leading up to commemorations of the 60th anniversary of
the end of the World War II. But curiously, it omitted the term "harmonious
society" - President Hu Jintao's populist catch-phrase for the effort to correct
the lopsided wealth disparity, a side-effect of China's rapid development. The
editorial is peculiar by its stance that widening inequality is an inevitable
phase of development.
On August 3, the Culture Ministry announced that
Beijing would bar new foreign television channels from entering China and step
up management of imported programming to safeguard national cultural safety.
This announcement, backed up by a statement from the Xinhua News Agency, could
be perceived as a further tightening of western popular culture in an effort to
keep out liberal Western materials that could be socially perilous.
Then
on August 5, Health Minister Gao Qiang was quoted in this China Daily
criticizing China's hospitals for being greedy and putting profit ahead of their
social function, thus adding to the burdens on patients and undermining the
image of medical personnel and public health departments.
These three
statements are an indication that the authorities no longer refuse to discuss
China's growing disparity and problems in public.
The People's Daily
commentary is particularly significant, as it signals a debate among the leaders
on whether to allow continuous rapid growth and economic liberalization, or to
promote greater equality and redistribution in China, a choice of more
capitalism or more socialism. .
People's Daily commentary echoes liberal
economists and politicians who argue for a continuous push toward reform and
opening up, of China's economy and society along the lines of World Trade
Organization tenets. Their argument is based on the fact that if the Chinese
economy does not produce at least 8 percent growth per annum, the urban
unemployment problem could rise to levels that would jeopardize stability.
This liberal school, which hitched onto the WTO bandwagon under the
patronage of former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, believed China should aim to
become a developed economy in 50 years' time. The People's Daily commentary
reflects this school of thought, which considers that a widening revenue gap -
and hence some inequality - is indispensable in pursuing economic prosperity.
China's socialist economists, on the other hand, have begun to criticize
China's current rampant development, questioning the need to accumulate more
than $700 billion of foreign reserves at a time when social imbalances are
increasing at an alarming rate.
Senior officials within the State
Council, Finance Ministry and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have begun
to warn of the need for a more social approach to maintaining stability,
emphasizing social justice - including the authorities' battle against
corruption - and redistribution to dampen widening disparities. The health
minister's criticism of the public service's "profit-chasing" ethos is a
reflection of this school of thought.
The Culture Ministry's
regulations, for their part, indicate that the authorities may encourage a more
nationalistic, less liberal, less Western cultural model. To stage an
American-style Super Bowl and the likes of Miss Jackson exposing breast before
eyes of millions, in China, no way.
This ideology-versus-economics debate will ultimately determine the direction
of China in the next decades, as social tensions are expected to stay there in a
society that is revolutionizing much faster than Western societies have in the
past century.
As the winds of change sweep through China, it is this philosophical and
social debate - and not the yuan revaluation or the Unocal debacle - that will
ultimately determine the direction of China's economy and society, as well as
its peaceful rise.
| The above content represents the view of the author
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