DEXTER TIFF ROBERTS
Executive Summary
“All enterprises must persevere in putting proletarian politics in command and ideological and political work first.”1 —Document of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, September 2, 1975
China’s leadership has embarked on a new and risky path in economic policy making, one that has huge implications for the Chinese people and for the world. It stands in marked contrast to the emphasis on market opening and engagement with the world that defined the first decades of the post-Mao period that started in 1978. Instead today Beijing is intent on strengthening control over private companies and foreign investment, reserving set shares of its market for indigenously produced technologies like semiconductor chips and electric vehicle batteries, and boosting the role of state-owned firms
It is all part of what can be considered a new form of state capitalism, defined by a top-down approach to the economy featuring government-directed and supported industrial policies with the goal of creating a far more self-sufficient country, and critically, one that continues to grow rapidly. At the same time, it aims to be more egalitarian, overcoming some of the inequalities associated with the earlier approach of growth at all costs while avoiding the social instability that might result from too large a gap. Beijing sees it as providing a new model of growth for developing countries around the world and as directly competing with a Western free market model that China’s leaders believe is becoming increasingly broken. In a speech earlier this year to top provincial and national officials, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), described the rest of the world
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