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Economics

صدام الصين القادم مع الواقع الاقتصادي

Oct 24, 2022 Jim O'Neill

لندن - وفقًا للتقارير الواردة من المؤتمر الوطني العشرين للحزب الشيوعي الصيني، يقوم شي جين بينغ، الذي تم تنصيبه مؤخرًا رئيسًا لولاية ثالثة غير مسبوقة، بإحكام قبضته السياسية وتعزيز سيطرة الحزب الشيوعي الصيني على المجتمع. هل يمكن أن تستمر التنمية الاقتصادية الناجحة في هذه البيئة؟

لقد كنت أفكر منذ عدة أشهر أنني سأستيقظ ذات يوم لأقرأ أخبار حول قيام الصين بإعادة النظر في إستراتجية صفر كوفيد الخاصة بها، مما يُغير تمامًا طريقة تفاعل الحزب الشيوعي الصيني مع الشركات المحلية الخاصة، فضلاً عن إصلاح نظام هوكو لتصاريح الإقامة في البلاد، وإعادة التفكير في بعض الجوانب الرئيسية لمبادرة الحزام والطريق وموقفها التكتيكي الأخير بشأن الحوكمة الدولية. قد نضطر إلى الانتظار طويلاً لحين حدوث ذلك.

وفي اجتماع مع أحد كبار المسؤولين الصينيين قبل بضعة أشهر، قلت مازحًا إن فهمي للصين لأكثر من ثلاثين عامًا قد يكون مجرد مصادفة، حيث لم أستطع فهم بعض السياسات التي اعتمدتها البلاد في السنوات الأخيرة. تتمثل الطريقة الوحيدة التي يمكنني من خلالها تبرير هذه السياسات في استنتاج أنها يجب أن تكون جزءًا من مناورة تكتيكية لتحييد الفصائل داخل المستويات العليا للحزب الشيوعي الصيني قبل المؤتمر الوطني للحزب. وإذا حكمنا من خلال انتخاب زعيم جديد لمساعدة شي، فمن المؤكد أن يكون هناك المزيد من عمليات التطهير للمعارضين - ودلائل قليلة جدًا تُشير إلى سحب السياسات التي تم تقديمها في السنوات الأخيرة.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 11 Comments on this article

Frank Youell Feb 23, 2023

China already (not in 2100) has the world's largest economy. Check the actual statistics from the IMF, World Bank, and CIA if you have any doubts. As for future growth, China's prospects are bright. Any number of sources put India and China in the lead (with India, not China as number one).
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Robert Johnston Oct 30, 2022

Over millennia, China's emperors have never hesitated to sacrifice economic prosperity to surveillance and repression. Eventually of course the cycle turns (and it has nothing to do with foreign competition), but in this case there is a great deal of economic energy still there, and being carefully and powerfully nurtured not least to protect living standards, to keep the emperor in power for quite some time yet.
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vic lai Oct 27, 2022

Xi's ongoing unabated zero-Covid lock-down policy in China looks suicidal so far as the continued rapid growth of the country's GDP is concerned, especially when the policy is compared with the pandemic policies of most other western countries where businesses there are now as usual.
According to Louis Gave, it's just been a relatively minor management-policy mistake committed by President Xi himself at the very beginning of the start of the Covid pandemic in China, but unexpectedly with much more subsequent black-swan-like collateral damages delivered not only to the Chinese economy but also to the rest of the world.
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Xi's zero-Covid lockdown policy has not really been a domestic tool of political or economic control, as many people have claimed, nor even a rehearsal of strict city-control to prepare for China's coming Unification War in Taiwan.
The only possible explanation is that Xi made an initial minor policy mistake when China's Covid outbreak started in Wuhan.
Instead of delegating the job of fighting Covid to his subordinates, he said he himself was in charge of fighting the pandemic in China, showing to the world that he's always been a responsible and caring top leader in the country.
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Doing so, he has violated the first rule of management, which is to find somebody as the scapegoat if something goes seriously wrong, fire the person at once, and quickly replaces him or her with another person, just like what Putin has always been doing to his army generals recently during the war in Ukraine.
Even worse, his zero-Covid lock-down policy seems to have worked very well in Wuhan to begin with.
But when the Covid situation in China keeps deteriorating in the following quarters, he finds it face-losing or, even much more important, a serious and big challenge to his own political authority, if he's "forced" by his aides to change his original good old policy.
Hence the persistent lockdown policy in China up until today, and this policy may even persist for quite some time even after the successful end of all the latest important succession meetings in Beijing.
According to Gave, Xi's pivot is as important as Chairman Powell's pivot in the near future, if not even more important, so far as the coming overall performance of the global macroeconomies is concerned.
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Now we're able to appreciate much more why China's Cultural Revolution led by Chairman Mao in the last century lasted for as long as 10 horrible years.
Compared to what'd been happening in China during the country's 10-year-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, the US-instigated Color Revolutions in many other countries and cities in the past years were just child's plays.
In an "authoritative" eastern country like China, perhaps a political leader's face-losing is a very serious matter, and so the top leader there can never ever be challenged whatsoever even when he himself knows full well that he's just made a very serious political or economic mistake which ends up hurting his country (and other countries) tremendously.
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The Supreme Court of the United States seems to be the unique and final arbiter of last resort for any serious political or social argument coming from bipartisan politics in the US, but such a political mechanism is obviously missing in those Eastern countries like today's China.
Perhaps East doesn't meet West.
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- vic lai Oct 29, 2022
  
  The same policy mistake was also made by Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's former Chief Executive from 2017 to 2022.
  After her city government's successful clampdown on the US-cum-Taiwan-instigated color revolution in the city, her chance of having a second term as Hong Kong's political head was still fifty-fifty.
  But immediately after the first serious breakout of the pandemic in the city, she also took the lead in the following whole-city-fight against the Covid virus, without delegating the job to the Chief Secretary or other aide.
  Her subsequent less-than-satisfactory Covid-fighting performances cost her the second 5-year term, and she has now been replaced by the then Chief Secretary, John Lee.
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  Without much economics training, Chairman Mao wanted to quickly increase the harvests of the country's farmers, with well intentions, through the communist People's Communes.
  The resulting disastrous big famines from his Great Leap Forward movement had cost the country tens of millions of lives, and he temporarily went to the backstage of the political arena, preparing for the following Cultural Revolution which had probably unfolded in a persistent manner quite different from his original plans.
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  Without a politcal election system held every few years, like the West's which can rather quickly replace the incumbent top leader without causing much collateral damages to the people of the country, China is widely expected to repeat the same kind of face-losing ordeal in the future.
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  - vic lai Nov 2, 2022
    
    While Xi's face-losing ordeal has been hurting quite seriously the domestic economies of both China and Hong Kong, China's similar face-losing-avoiding diplomatic or geopolitical strategy in the international arena should be strictly avoided by Xi's new ruling central government in the coming years, especially during China's long rise to dominant global hegemony perhaps one day in the far future.
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    China should avoid direct or indirect military confrontations with the US and her allies in the foreseeable future, say as a result of the US's incessant provocation through the help of autonomy-seeking Taiwan, since it's well known that the US intends to turn Asia's Taiwan into Europe's Ukraine in the near future in order to much weaken and exhaust quickly-rising China.
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    Diplomatically and geopolitically, China's (short-term) face-losing shouldn't matter to Xi and his ruling government whatsoever, what he should constantly be striving for is getting (in the background) more and more real international and geopolitical benefits of all kinds (say, through her One-Belt One-Road Initiative) to further strengthen the overall global competitiveness of his country in the coming decades.
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    - vic lai Nov 5, 2022
      
      The latest visit by Germany's Chancellor to China doesn't imply the EU countries led by Germany(-cum-France) will be pro-China and anti-US in the foreseeable future, at least not geopolitically.
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      Germany only wants to have a closer economic tie with China in the coming years to help solve her own worsening economic problems, but she still has to keep relying on the US's military presence in western Europe to help defend the NATO countries from the future possible eastern expansion of Russia, especially if Russia ends up winning the war in Ukraine.
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      If China "invades" Taiwan in the near future, Germany and other NATO countries will no doubt continue to side with the US's allied military troops by actively intervening in the Taiwan agency war in Asia, against "barbarous" China.
      China beware.
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      - vic lai Nov 5, 2022
        
        China's airbus-buying big order for Germany should be made on a conditional step-by-step manner, extended for a relatively long period of time, to ensure that Germany will not, after getting the big order from China in a single big signed contract, quickly turn against China, say by sending his own military troops, monies, or ammunitions to support Taiwan in her fight against China one day in the future.
        No compensation should be given by China to Germany, if China unilaterally cancels the contracts of buying the rest of the ordered planes from Germany.
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        vic lai Nov 6, 2022
        
        China's recent large-scale re-introduction of her good old low- or non-profit-making cooperatives in more and more cities of the country should similarly be extended to her own commercial banking system, which this time should mainly aim at the country's numerous job-producing and innovative small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs), and no longer at the local government's financing vehicles (LGFVs).
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        According to Ellen Brown, "(Richard) Werner observes that Germany exports nearly as much as China does, although the German population is a mere 6% of China’s.
        The Chinese also have low-wage advantages.
        How can German small firms compete when U.S. firms cannot ?
        Werner credits Germany’s 1,500 not-for-profit community banks, the largest number in the world.
        Seventy percent of German deposits are with these local banks – 26.6% with cooperative banks and 42.9% with publicly-owned savings banks called Sparkassen, which are legally limited to lending in their own communities.
        Together, these local banks do over 90% of SME lending. Germany has more than ten times as many banks engaged in SME lending as the UK, and German SMEs (those hidden champions) are world market leaders in many industries.
        Small banks lend to small companies, while large banks lend to large companies ------ and to large-scale financial speculators."
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        In China, unlike the situations in the West, harmful bank credit creations for virtual-economy asset transactions and real-economy consumption should be suppressed, while productive credits of the banks should be actively encouraged in the Main Street.
        This is a sure macroeconomic recipe for China's continued high real economic growth or economic miracle in the coming decades, together with low domestic inflation rates.
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Mirek Fatyga Oct 24, 2022

Everyone's clash with economic reality. Given the 8 billion population, everyone will be dealing with scarcities of various kinds for the foreseeable future. This scarcity has different impacts on different countries:

In the developed world it puts downward pressures on living standards which cannot be remedied by simple political rearrangement. This means political tensions and political turbulence endangering the very Democratic project there.

In the developing world it puts an invisible but real lid on development which, again, cannot be easily remedied by better politics. This means political pressures which favor autocracy as any experimentation with Democracy ends in economic disappointment. I suspect that the Chinese apparatchiks know this, know that the economic miracle is mostly over. This is why they have already prepared harsh social controls and may turn to foreign aggression as a distraction.

The only solution to these problems is technological retooling which may or may not be possible. Even if retooling is possible it will take time and money. In the meantime societies will have to live with political tensions. We need honest assessment of what is possible, rather than happy talk.

Repeating ad nauseam: if one wanted to extend North American use of oil per capita to 8 billion people, the production of oil would have to increase by ~600%. To the EU level, by ~300%. This is the scale of the problem and we are talking here about just one scarce resource.
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Peter McLoughlin Oct 24, 2022

All hegemons eventually have to face reality: the reality of being supplanted by a rival, rising power.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
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alex Finch Oct 24, 2022

The elephant in the room is not China, it is Europe. The corruption and demographic problems facing Europe equals anything China might be facing. Speaking of Economic Reality, one has to compare apples with apples. I would argue that the majority of Chinese people today, live in better housing than many Europeans. Four and five star hotels in Asia are of a higher quality, and better value for money than those in Europe. Corruption and cronyism is widespread and entrenched in Europe (just look at „neutral“ Austria racked with scandal after scandal yet still has no freedom of information act - the Hypo Alpe Adria scandal alone costing taxpayers €9-Billion on losses, equal to China losing $1.3 Trillion on a per capita basis; then there’s the scandal where 60.000 government owned housing apartments were privatized at a fraction of the true value). Rather than invest in housing as the Chinese have done, Europeans, apart from those who inherited real estate, have most their financial assets in cash and bonds (the worst investments of all with high inflation), many now scrambling to buy old apartments up to 50 years old at inflated prices just to offload cash. Where China perhaps built too many units, Germany now has a huge shortage, need to build 400.000 per year at a time where building costs are through the roof. You really think China has a problem?
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صدام الصين القادم مع الواقع الاقتصادي

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