The End of Chinese Central Planning

Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the early 1980’s, senior Chinese policymakers have paid less and less attention to central planners’ numerical growth targets. Now they are close to taking the final step in the long journey to a market-based economy, by adopting a flexible framework in which GDP growth currently does not come first.

BEIJING – “Isn’t it now time for China to abandon the concept of a growth target?”

That was the question I asked Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei this week at the 15th annual China Development Forum, which brings together top Chinese officials and an international delegation of academics, leaders of multilateral organizations, and business executives. Having attended the CDF since former Premier Zhu Rongji initiated it in 2000, I can attest to its role as one of China’s most important platforms for debate. Zhu welcomed the exchange of views at the Forum as a true intellectual test for China’s reformers.

It was in that spirit that I posed my question to Lou, whom I have known since the late 1990’s. In that period, he has been Deputy Minister of Finance, founding Chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation, and now Minister of Finance. I have always found him to be direct, intellectually curious, a first-rate analytical thinker, and a forward-looking advocate of market-based reforms. He is cut from the same cloth as his mentor, Zhu.

https://prosyn.org/hWXrN9M