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Ch14 THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA -- 消极 - (3715 Byte) 2007-12-24 周一, 上午1:05 (1500 reads) |
消极
[个人文集]
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作者：消极 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
排版真不容易。
下面是The Age of Turbulance第14章。书的前半部是自传性质，按格老的话说“a 60 years learning process”。第10章以后他开始做结论。第14章就是专谈中国问题的，我估计这书在国内是不可能出版的，否则芦选也可以出版了，比如格老对权力递减的描叙和老芦是一样的。
. On my last visit to China as Fed chairman in October 2005, Zhu Rongji, China's retired premier, and his wife, Lao An, hosted a small farewell dinner at Beijing's elegant Diaoyutai State Guest House, where the Chinese leadership entertains visiting dignitaries. Zhu and I had a chance to talk during a formal tea before the dinner, and the manner in which he spoke raised serious doubts in my mind as to whether he was truly retired, as the official press so consistently maintained. He was wholly absorbed by and informed about the key issues between our nations and was as insightful and incisive as he had ever been in our eleven-year friendship.
As we compared views on China's exchange rate and America's trade imbalances, I marveled at his detailed knowledge of China's economic shortfalls and the needed remedies. I was struck again by the level of sophistication he brought to such matters, unusual even among world leaders. Over the years we had explored many issues: how China could disentangle its social safety net from the disintegrating state-run enterprises on which it depended, the optimum form of bank supervision, the need for the thennascent Chinese stock market to be left alone to develop, and more.
THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA I had grown quite fond of Zhu and was saddened to realize that we were unlikely to meet again. We'd become friends when he was vice premier and head of China's central bank, and I had followed his career closely He was the intellectual heir of Deng Xiaoping, the great economic reformer who had brought China from the age of the bicycle to the age of the motor vehicle and all that that implies. Unlike Deng, who had a broad political base, Zhu was a technician; his influence, as best I can judge, rested on deep support from Jiang Zemin, China's president from 1993 to 2003 and Party leader from 1989 to 2002. It was Zhu who had brought to realization many of the sweeping institutional reforms that Deng had initiated.
As much pragmatist as Marxist, Deng had set in motion China's transformation from a walled-off centrally planned agrarian economy into a formidable presence on the economic scene.The nation's march to the market began in 1978, when, because of a severe drought, authorities were forced to ease tight administrative controls that had long governed individual farmers' plots. Under new rules, the farmers were allowed to keep a significant part of their produce to consume or sell. The results were startling. Agricultural output rose dramatically, encouraging further deregulation and the development of farm markets. After decades of stagnation, agricultural productivity blossomed.
Success on the farm encouraged the spread of reform to industry. Again, a modest easing of constraints produced greater-than-anticipated growth, giving impetus to the arguments of reformers who wished to move more quickly toward a competitive-market template. No advocates ever dared call the new model "capitalism."
They used euphemisms like "market socialism" or, in the famous phrase of Deng, "socialism with Chinese characteristics." China's leaders were far too perceptive not to see the contradictions and limitations of socialist economics and the evidence of capitalist success. Indeed, why else would they have embarked on so ambitious an enterprise so alien to the traditions of the Communist Party? As China was inexorably drawn further and further down the road toward capitalism, economic progress became so compelling that the ideological debate of earlier years seemed to have passed into history.
I first set foot in China in 1994, long after the reforms had begun. I've been back several times. Like all visitors, I've been impressed and often amazed by the changes from visit to visit. The Chinese economy measured by purchasing power parity has become the second largest behind that of the United States. China has also emerged as the world's largest consumer of commodities generally the second-largest consumer of oil, and the largest steel producer, and has evolved from the bicycle economy of the 1980s into a country that produced more than seven million motor vehicles in 2006, with planned facilities to reach far beyond that. Skyscrapers are sprouting up in fields that for millennia went unchanged from harvest to harvest. The drab universal dress code of generations of Chinese has yielded to a riotous spectrum of color. And as incomes rise with prosperity a shopping culture is emerging. Today advertising, once unknown, is one of China's most rapidly growing industries, and international retailing giants like Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and B&Q are vying with the newly innovative Chinese shopkeeper.
In a land not far removed in time from the collective farm, loosely articulated urban property rights appear to be enforced; otherwise, foreign investment in real estate, factories, and securities would long since have dried up. Investors behave as though they expect to get returns on their investments and return of principal. And they have.* Chinese citizens have been granted the right to own and sell homes, creating a major opportunity to accumulate capital. Hernando de Soto, I assume, is pleased. And in March 2007, the National People's Congress passed a more comprehensive right of ownership that grants the same legal protection of property that is granted to the state. But the right to own property still falls far short of the status of property rights in developed countries. Property rights require not only a statute but an administrative and judicial system that enforces the law. In this regard, China lags. An impartial judiciary is still a goal on the Chinese horizon. There are breaches, especially in intellectual property rights: complaints by foreign joint-venture investors are rife that technology *Certainly the dramatic decontrol of prices for a large segment of the retail market encouraged foreign investment. By 1991, almost 70 percent of retail prices were market oriented—almost double the percentage in 1987, when the early evidence appeared that central planning behind the iron curtain was faltering. In the late 1980s, the import tax on parts and components for building export goods eased significantly, increasing the profitability of exports. 296 THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA brought to a new plant turns up duplicated in a plant wholly owned by Chinese in direct competition.
An important casualty of China's growing affluence is the nation's commitment to its Communist revolutionary roots. In the myriad meetings I had with Chinese economic and financial officials, I do not recall ever hearing uttered the words "Communism" or "Marx." Of course, I was dealing largely with "liberals." I did participate in one ideological exchange—in 1994, when I "debated" free-market capitalism with Li Peng, a fervent Marxist and Zhu's predecessor as premier. He was quite knowledgeable about U.S. economic practice, and a formidable debater. Right from the start, it was clear that I wasn't facing Marxist dialectic of the type I'd had to deal with in college. Li listened intently to my carefully reasoned position on why China should open its markets faster. He responded by asking how, if the United States was so devoted to unregulated markets, I could account for Nixon's wage and price controls in 1971.1 was delighted that he knew to ask. Not only was he connected to the real world, but also, for a reputed hard-liner, he sounded almost reasonable. I acknowledged that price controls had been a bad policy and that their only saving grace had been to reaffirm that such controls don't work. I added that we had not been tempted since. I didn't expect to change his mind, however. We were both in the sad state of government officials who engage in debate, yet even when proved wrong lack the authority to acknowledge error. No matter how hard I tried to convince him, or he me, neither of us could publicly veer from his government's declared policies.
I have not spoken with Li Peng for years and can only wonder what he must have thought when, in 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization, the bastion of free competitive trade. I had been a staunch supporter of legislation creating permanent normal trade relations with China, believing that its full acceptance into the world trade system would benefit Chinese citizens, who would see their standards of living rise, and U.S. businesses and farmers, who would find a more welcoming and as yet untapped market. In May 2000, at President Clinton's request, I spoke at the White House of my hopes of bringing China fully into the global marketplace, arguing that such a move would foster individual rights and strengthen the rule of law. I told reporters: "History has demonstrated that implicit in any 297 removal of power from central planners and broadening of market mechanisms as would occur under WTO is a more general spread of rights to individuals." (Underscoring the reason for my presence, Clinton added mischievously, "We all know that when Chairman Greenspan talks, the world listens. I just hope that Congress is listening today.")
China's involvement in the institutions of global finance brought other benefits. Chinese central bankers now play a key role in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland, an institution long associated with capitalist international finance. Zhou Xiaochuan, who was named China's central bank governor in 2002, was particularly welcome at regular BIS meetings of central bankers from major developing countries. In addition to fluency in English and international finance, Zhou brought a candid appraisal of what was happening in China that few of us could replicate from other sources. He would often detail the way the Chinese financial markets were evolving, and give me a new perspective. In 2006, after leaving the Fed, I served with Zhou on a committee to examine financing issues related to the International Monetary Fund. He and his colleagues, just a few years removed from isolated central planning, have become major players in operating the global financial system.
Significantly, China is also absorbing much Western culture. HSBC, one of the leading international banks, has for the past two years sponsored a multimillion-dollar golf tournament in Shanghai. Golf courses have been popping up across China, and the surprise is not that they have but that nobody seems to have thought it unusual.* Few sports are as symbolically capitalist as golf. The Soviet Union had professional tennis players, but no golfers.
I am told there are actually more Western classical symphony orchestras in China than in the United States. And I was taken aback when President Jiang Zemin told me that his favorite composer was Franz Schubert. This is a very far cry from the culture that greeted President Nixon on his visit to China in 1972.
I have always been of the opinion that Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were the proximate cause of the Soviet Union's demise. They exposed the Soviet people to "liberal" values that Stalin and most of his successors had long suppressed. After the Pandora's box was opened, given the way ideas spread, the demise of collectivism in the USSR and its satellites was just a matter of time. Efforts by the Chinese Communist Politburo to control information on the Internet suggest to me that they have drawn the same conclusion and do not wish to see history repeat itself.
In 1994, standing near the spot in Tiananmen Square where, in 1949, Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China, I could only marvel at how difficult the Chinese transition to modernity has been—and yet, in recent years, how successful. Here, where a freedomsuppressing student massacre had occurred five years earlier, I also found myself wondering how after generations of Marxist indoctrination a society of 1.3 billion could turn abruptly and abandon the values inculcated during the impressionable years of childhood. Perhaps, despite China's dramatic progress, those values are more persistent than they seem. Although change is everywhere, Chairman Mao's face still adorns China's currency, a hint that the pull of tradition remains strong.
The Communist Party came to power through revolution, and has from its beginnings sought political legitimacy as the purveyor of a philosophy that was just and that offered material well-being for the whole of the population. Material well-being, however, is only part of what human beings strive for, and it alone cannot sustain an authoritarian regime. The cheer of new affluence rapidly fades and, with time, becomes the base from which additional, even higher, expectations evolve. In the last quarter century, it has been the rapid increases in standards of living that have gained the support of the people.
At any rate, it was just a matter of time before the inherent contradictions of Communist ideology became manifest. The specters of Marx and Mao, lying quiescent during the years of accelerating affluence, stirred in 2006 in the person of Liu Guoguang, a retired octogenarian Marxist economist who derailed a proposed constitutional amendment to clarify and expand property rights. He held up the ideological banner of the Communist state and, by attracting unexpected support, prevailed in the National Peo- 299 THE AGE OF T U R B U L E N CE pie's Congress. The ground had been prepared by fiery remarks by Gong Xiantian, a professor at Beijing University Law School, which had been circulated on the Internet. In response to the criticism from the Marxist left, President Hu Jintao stated that China must "unshakably persist with economic reform." It remains to be seen whether this ideological eruption is the last gasp of an aging generation or a more fundamental undermining of China's road to capitalism. Encouraging, as I noted, was the passage of the amendment with only minor changes by the National People's Congress meeting in March 2007.
For the past generation, the Chinese leadership has been quite inventive in avoiding what virtually everyone has concluded: despite his brilliance, Karl Marx was wrong in his analysis of the way people can organize to successfully create value. To Marx, state ownership of the means of production was the essential fixture in a society's ability to produce wealth and justice. The right to virtually all property in Marx's society was thus to rest with the state, in trust for the people. Property rights granted to individuals were instruments of exploitation and could come only at the expense of the "collective," that is, society as a whole. He argued for the collectivization of the division of labor. All working together for a single goal would be far more productive than markets collating the disparate choices of individuals. Do human beings optimize their potential in a collectivized society? The ultimate arbiter of all such paradigms is reality. Does it work as proposed? Marx's economic model in practice—in the USSR and elsewhere—could not produce wealth or justice, as is now generally recognized. The rationale for collective ownership failed.
Socialists in the West, adjusting to the failure of Marxist economics, have redefined socialism to no longer require that all the means of production be owned by the state. Some simply advocate government regulation rather than state ownership to foster societal well-being.
Deng Xiaoping, confronting Marx's fall from favor, bypassed Communist ideology and rested Party legitimacy on its ability to meet the material needs of over a billion people. He set in motion a process that led to an unprecedented near-eightfold increase in real per capita GDP, a fall in infant mortality, and greater life expectancy. But as many in the Party leadership 300 THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA feared, replacement of government controls by market pricing began to weaken political control by the Party.
I saw how that worked in a visit to Shanghai in 1994. A senior official told the story of how five years earlier he had been assigned to oversee the produce depot. He had to be present every morning at five o'clock to allocate farm products coming into Shanghai, he told me. His job was to dictate who got what. Though he didn't elaborate on how he made those decisions, clearly he held considerable sway—I could imagine the favors he must have been offered by distributors eager to cultivate his goodwill. All the same, he said, he'd been delighted when the depot was converted to an open market, with the distributors bidding for produce. Now, instead of one guy deciding who got the bamboo shoots and at what price, buyers and sellers bargained until they agreed. The market set the price, and the produce was allocated according to demand and supply—a clear illustration of the fundamental difference between a command economy and a market economy. Because of this change, the official confided merrily, his life had become a lot easier. "Now I don't have to get up at four a.m. I can sleep in and let the market do my job for me."
I said to myself, "Can he conceivably understand what he just said?" As markets take over, Communist Party control shrinks. The Communist system is a pyramid in which power flows from the top. The general secretary enables, say, ten people who report to him to have discretionary powers. Each of them, in turn, grants discretionary power to much larger numbers directly below them. The handoff proceeds and expands as it works its way down to the bottom of the pyramid. The system holds together because each official is beholden to the person directly above him. This is the source of political power. This is how the Party governs. However, if market pricing is substituted for any level of the pyramid, political control is lost. You cannot have both market pricing and political control. One precludes the other. This is already causing a serious strain within the power structure of the Party.
To date, Party elders appear to have finessed this fundamental dilemma. Nonetheless, growing affluence is gradually freeing the Chinese peasant from the soil and subsistence, affording him or her the luxury of being able to protest perceived injustices. I cannot believe that the Party is unaware 301 THE AGE OF T U R B U L E N CE that affluence and recent education initiatives are moving China toward a far less authoritarian regime. Today, President Hu appears to wield less political power than did Jiang Zemin, and he less than Deng Xiaoping. And Deng far less than Mao. At the end of this road of ever-lessening power is the democratic welfare state of Western Europe. Along that way are the many hurdles that still separate China from "developed economy" status, Deng's avowed goal. Many of the huge challenges China's reformers face are well known: the reactionary old guard; the vast rural population that is to date barely sharing in the boom and is with modest exceptions forbidden to migrate to cities; the huge remaining chunks of the Soviet-style command economy, including still-bloated, inefficient state-owned enterprises; the largely struggling banking system that serves those enterprises; the lack of modern financial and accounting expertise; corruption, the almost necessary by-product of any pyramidal power structure based on discretion; and finally, lack of political freedom, which may not be needed for markets to function in the short run, but is an important safety valve for public distress about injustice and inequity. In addition, the Chinese leadership has to deal with widespread envy of the newly affluent and popular outrage at industrial pollution. Any of these factors could spark a conflagration. Despite having opened significant parts of its economy to market forces, China is still dominated by administrative controls, the remnants of central planning. As a consequence, the economy remains rigid and I fear would not be able to absorb debilitating shocks as the United States did following 9/11.
The depth of China's remaining problems can best be seen in the difficulty the leadership has had dismantling the remaining central-planning controls. After the initial burst of decontrol-engendered affluence that followed Deng's reform of the 1980s, further progress was inhibited for years. The primary culprits were China's misdirected foreign-exchange-rate regime and the laws that severely inhibit citizens' freedom to migrate between rural and urban locales, or between towns and cities. A major, though incomplete, dismantling of these two significant aspects of central planning was required to keep China on the heightened-growth path that it had experienced over the previous decade.
The first focus was the exchange-rate regime of China's currency, the 302 THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA renminbi, or RMB for short. No, the exchange rate was not too low; as most complain today; in the early 1980s it was too high. Central planners had fixed the RMB at an unrealistic rate in the face of a much lower rate that prevailed on the black market. International trade at the official rate in the early 1980s was understandably slow. Chinese exporters whose costs were in RMB had to charge noncompetitively high prices in dollars to recoup. As the contrast with the newly deregulated and thriving domestic trade became obvious, monetary authorities progressively devalued the RMB. But the process took them fourteen years. By 1994 it was fully freed for trade transactions, and the black market in RMB disappeared. The RMB went from under two to more than eight per dollar.
After an initial lag, Chinese exports exploded, rising from $18 billion in 1980 to $970 billion in 2006, an annual growth rate of nearly 17 percent. Well in excess of half of Chinese exports are fabricated from imported materials, and those exports are moving to ever-higher-valued products, as evidenced by the rise in average export prices that exceed price indexes based on a fixed basket of goods.* What is not clear, however, is how much of the rise in average prices merely reflects a higher quality of intermediate products imported for assembly in final export products.
This is important, because the greater the extent to which Chinese exports are becoming high tech, the greater China's competitive impact on the developed world. China may be moving up on the technology ladder. It is exporting far more sophisticated products than it did a decade ago. But is it the Chinese who are creating the higher level of sophistication? Or is China merely assembling more sophisticated products produced by others? The Economist, reflecting in part the views of Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, commented in the spring of 2007 that "China's export m o d e l . . . consists in big measure of renting out cheap labour and land to foreigners. Even China's most successful domestic computer firm . . . contracts its production out to Taiwanese companies." I assume, however, that it is only a matter of time before China accounts for an increasing proportion of the value of its exports. I expect the Chinese to gradually replace their imported materials with high-value-added domestically produced components.
The rising path of exports paralleled the epochal shift of rural workers to the cities. The rural population peaked in 1995 at nearly 860 million. Eleven years later it was down to 737 million. That shift was not only the result of people moving to cities and some definitional changes but also the result of rural land being urbanized as new manufacturing enclaves began to sprout up; mainly in the Pearl River delta contiguous to vibrant Hong Kong. In the 1970s this fertile area was home to sleepy farms and villages, but in the last fifteen years pioneering foreign investors from Hong Kong and elsewhere have stoked the region's growth. The delta now produces everything from toys to textiles, most of it manufactured for export. Hong Kong's example and assistance in the development of the Pearl River delta's economy has been striking.
When China reestablished its sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, I did not hold much hope for the survival of Hong Kong capitalism. The notion that China would honor its pledge that Hong Kong would remain a bastion of capitalism for fifty years seemed to me rather naive. Capitalism and Communism side by side under the same sovereign authority was just not credible. But the decade of Deng's "One Country, Two Systems" has turned out quite differently than I feared. China, instead of replacing Hong Kong's culture and economy with its Communist imprint, has found itself increasingly influenced by the culture and economic rules of Hong Kong.
The 1.4 percent annual average net shift of rural to urban population over the last decade has measurably increased China's productivity: the capital stock in urban areas is significantly more sophisticated than that in rural China. That spread has created an urban output per hour more than three times that of rural China. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) inaugurated in 1980, which focused on manufacturing exports in facilities financed by foreign capital, have proved highly successful. Privatization of some stateowned enterprises (SOEs) has made significant progress, and other SOEs are undergoing major restructuring. As a consequence, employment in these organizations has fallen sharply, an indication that creative destruction is moving at a reasonably good clip.
Restructuring a number of SOEs and privatizing most of the remainder has required moving the social insurance and welfare obligations of the SOEs to other government entities or private financing. The SOEs would obviously not be able to compete if they had to carry the full cost of the social safety net on their books. Padding SOE employment rolls as an indirect form of unemployment insurance is fading. At one of those traditional tea servings in the Great Hall of the People, Chinese president Jiang Zemin in 1997 described to me how he had run a large state-owned steel complex. He was proud that with significantly fewer workers he had succeeded in producing as much steel as a rival SOE in northeast China.
It is a matter of conjecture whether the rural migration to the cities would have been even faster were it not for long-standing restrictions on internal migration. Such restrictions in their current form date back to 1958. Everyone from birth is required to live in the geographic area of his or her mother. Official permission to move is granted to only a small fraction of the population. Such enforced immobility satisfies the need of central planners to have the pieces of the economy stay in place to promote the outcome of the central plan, though political control is also certainly an objective. The restrictions on migration also effectively limit people's choice of occupation.
I cannot imagine how people can thrive in such an environment, though I suppose it's an improvement from the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. The current leadership's ongoing efforts to ease these restrictions are important and welcome. But fear of a mass exodus from farms to cities and the unrest that could follow has inhibited change in this, as in so many aspects of Chinese life.
However, bottling up the frustrations imposed on the average person in rural areas, where the majority of the population still resides, is a recipe for insurrection. As the rapidly growing economy frees large numbers of Chinese to reach beyond the pursuit of mere subsistence, they have the leeway to contemplate perceived injustices, real or imagined. China does not have the safety valve of democracy to diffuse such unrest. Aggrieved people who do not have the option to vote officials out of office tend to rebel.
The hyperinflation in China in the late 1940s is often cited as a cause of the uprisings that brought the Communists to power in 1949, a lesson they learned well. So it is understandable that the Communists' greatest 305 THE AGE OF T U R B U L E N CE economic fear is an inflation that destabilizes society. As John Maynard Keynes noted in 1919: "Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
Chinese leaders harbor a deep-seated apprehension that unless inflation is contained, the economy will sputter, inducing a rise in unemployment in urban areas, sparking unrest. They see a stable exchange rate as necessary to avoid dreaded labor-market instability. They are mistaken. The current policy of suppressing the exchange rate risks a far greater disruption. As Chinese real per capita GDP has grown faster than that of the country's trading partners, the result largely of technology "borrowed" from developed economies, international competition has tended to elevate the demand for China's currency* To offset this demand and hold the RMB relatively stable from 2002 to 2007 has required cumulative purchases with RMB by Chinese monetary authorities well in excess of $1 trillion.+ To sop up, or sterilize, the excess cash that the central bank has created by purchasing foreign assets, the Chinese central bank has issued vast quantities of RMB-denominated debt. But it has not been enough. Money supply, as a consequence, has been growing at a rate disturbingly in excess of the growth in nominal GDR That is tinder for inflation.
A different problem, but equally troubling to Chinese leaders, is the rapid increase in the concentration of income. Starting from very little concentration in the 1980s, when everyone was uniformly poor, the emergence of a society in which income disparity is judged by the World Bank to be greater than that in both the United States and Russia is truly astounding. Another headache is the Chinese banking system, which to this day remains a long way from being effectively reformed. Yet stock prices of Chinese banks soared through 2006 and into 2007. The state-controlled Industrial and Commercial Bank of China raised $22 billion in 2006, the largest-ever initial public offering. Other state-controlled banks had large IPOs and overseas listing of shares as well. But much of the rush into Chinese statecontrolled institutions reflects investors' presumption that the Chinese government is in effect guaranteeing the liabilities of these banks. It has already recapitalized the banks with $60 billion from China's huge foreignexchange reserves and in the process removed many of the banks' bad loans. Chinese banks have historically financed a lot of politically useful investment, but much of it is obviously serving no useful economic purpose.
Moreover, the still inchoate banking system does not afford the degree of flexibility needed for economic adjustment. Market-based economies are continuously slipping out of balance, but market-driven changes in interest rates and exchange rates, along with product and asset price adjustments, quickly rebalance them. The Chinese government does not allow interest rates to float with supply and demand but changes them administratively along with changes in reserve requirements of the banks—but only after the evidence of economic imbalance is unambiguous. That is invariably too late, and a good deal of the time the resulting moves are insufficient or even counterproductive. Monetary officials give administrative guidance to banks on loan growth when they perceive growth to be too large, but again belatedly. These initiatives rarely properly address financial imbalances. Ironically, the disconnect between finance in China and the rest of the world insulated China from the financial crisis that spread around the globe in 1997-98.
China is in dire need of financial expertise. No wonder, because people with such expertise had little role to play under central planning. Neither did business marketers, accountants, risk managers, or other experts so essential to the day-to-day workings of a market economy. These skills have 3 07 entered the Chinese education curriculum in recent years, but it will take time before the economy especially the banking sector, becomes adequately staffed. In December 2003; Liu Mingkang, the new chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, visited the Federal Reserve Board. He acknowledged that Chinese banks lacked the professional expertise to judge what enabled a loan to be repaid. Liu indicated that increasing the foreign bank presence could help. I suggested that what China really needed was people who had worked in a market economy and had the sharp eyes and competitive judgment of able loan officers in the West. Much progress has been made since, but much needs to be done.
Because finance has little role to play in central planning, Chinese banks have not been banks as we know them in the West. Responding to political directives, state-owned banks in years past transferred funds to pay for stateinitiated commitments. There were no bank loan officers to make loans that would be expected to be repaid, just transfer agents. Bad debts in national income accounting are part of the reconciliation between GDP, the presumed market value of production, and employee compensation and profits, the claims to that production. To the extent that there are a lot of bum investments, part of the measured GDP is waste and of no value. Chinese bad-debt levels raise the same questions about what the published Chinese GDP numbers mean. However, I should point out that even investments that turn out not to have any continuing value nonetheless consume raw materials. Accordingly, the published levels of Chinese GDP are probably reasonably useful in evaluating the resources needed for its production— that is, as a measure of the value of needed input.
Even after adjusting for the questionable quality of some of China's data, the results of the reforms that commenced in the late 1970s remain truly remarkable. One needs only to observe the vast changes in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, and the lesser but still real changes in the rest of the country, to conclude that China is anything but a Potemkin village.
In my experience, it has been the technocrats in the Chinese government—mostly in the central bank, the finance ministry, and, surprisingly, the regulatory agencies—who have pressed for market initiatives. Most of them, however, serve only in advisory capacities. The key policy de- 308 THE CHOICES THAT AWAIT CHINA cisions are made by the State Council and the Politburo, and it is to their credit that they have largely embraced market-friendly advice. A remaining critical hurdle, and one that threatens Communist Party rule at its core, is its ideological challenge. Deng Xiaoping's goal of raising China to the status of "intermediate developed country" by midcentury requires additional reinforcement of property rights, even in the face of resistance from oldguard Marxists.
There has been progress on rights to urban property. Rights to land in the countryside, where 737 million Chinese reside, is another matter. Granting property rights to farmland is too unambiguous a break with Communist traditions to be countenanced easily. Farmers can lease land and sell products in open markets, but they have no legal rights to the land they till, and so cannot buy or sell it or use it as collateral for loans. In recent decades, as urbanization has encroached on rural China, local authorities have seized enormous expanses, granting as compensation only a small fraction of what the land would be worth as part of an urban enclave. Such seizures have been one of the main contributors to recent rising levels of protests and unrest. A top Chinese police official reported that the number of public protests nationwide rose to seventy-four thousand in 2004 from ten thousand a decade earlier. Estimates for 2006 were somewhat lower. Granting legal title to peasant land could, with the stroke of a pen, substantially narrow the wealth gap between urban and rural residents.
While economic supremacy is at the heart of Party initiatives, the leadership has other agendas, not the least of which is the status of Taiwan. Many, perhaps most, of the leaders know that a military confrontation would spook foreign capital investment and gravely damage the nation's aspiration to build a world-class economy.
In sum, the Communist Party leadership is confronted with very difficult choices. The track it is currently on will ultimately lead the Party to abandon its philosophical roots and more officially embrace some form of market capitalism. Does it then morph into a democratic socialist party, as has occurred in many states of the former Soviet bloc? Does it acquiesce in the political pluralism that is a likely consequence, thereby threatening the Party's hegemony? Or does the Party abandon reform and revert to an or- 309 thodox regime of central planning and authoritarianism, which would almost surely undermine the prosperity on which the leadership depends for legitimacy?
I have no doubt that the Communist Party of China can maintain an authoritarian, quasi-capitalist, relatively prosperous regime for a time. But without the political safety valve of the democratic process, I doubt the long-term success of such a regime. How those choices evolve will have profound implications not only for China but also for the world at large, an issue to which I will return. 310
作者：消极 在 驴鸣镇 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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