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2 China
reaches out with happy talk By
Peter Lee
The National People's Congress
(NPC), now in session, is the People's Republic of
China's designated venue for happy talk. It's a
time for reaching out beyond the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) and making nice with Chinese citizens
and the world at large.
It's also an
indication of where the CCP wishes things might
go, if not necessarily how it expects things to
turn out.
As China inches toward a major
leadership transition, the outgoing team would
like to bequeath a more favorable environment to
Xi Jinping and the "fifth generation" than the
current "bash the rising China threat" rhetoric
that underpins the global discourse today.
Therefore, China is positioning itself as
the global apostle of win-win, deliberately
counter-programming against a world
increasingly obsessed
with red lines, existential threats, trade wars,
currency wars, and zero-sum outcomes in economics,
diplomacy and security.
Overseas, the PRC
has made a high-profile venture into the Middle
East, trying to make the case for negotiation,
reconciliation and stability in Syria even as the
West and the Gulf Cooperation Council howl for
President Bashir al-Assad's head.
Domestically, at the NPC the Chinese
leadership made a determined effort to employ and
endorse the intellectual tools of the West,
coordinating its economic and social message with
a massive document released by the World Bank on
the eve of the Congress: China 2030. [1]
China 2030 is the swan song of Robert
Zoellick, the retiring head of the World Bank.
Zoellick originally earned his bones in the US
State Department as the father of the "responsible
stakeholder" meme, then took over the World Bank
in 2007 after the disastrous tenure of Paul
Wolfowitz. Zoellick pursued a line of engagement
with China, most notably in his suggestion that
the World Bank and the PRC could coordinate their
infrastructure initiatives in Africa.
China 2030 can be seen as an effort to put
some intellectual meat on the rhetorical bones of
"responsible stakeholder"-ism, which was primarily
employed as a propaganda tool with which to club
Beijing when its policies in places like Sudan
were not to America's liking.
The Chinese
government participated in the report - the World
Bank and the Development Research Center of the
State Council are listed as co-authors - and
Premier Wen Jiabao echoed its findings in his work
report to the NPC.
A dead giveaway to the
depth of collaboration between the PRC and the
World Bank on the report is in its full title:
China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and
Creative High Income Society.
It is safe
to say that no observer of China uses the term
"harmonious" - a trope of President Hu Jintao's
but now, through use of the Chinese-language
homonym "river crab", a term of widespread mockery
employed by critics to castigate the government's
pretensions to social progressiveness - without
strong and insistent input from Beijing.
Another tell: The word "democracy" does
not appear once in the entire 468-page document.
In an indication of the usual gormlessness
of the Western media, the Los Angeles Times chose
to characterize China 2030 - a carefully fashioned
olive branch from a key international institution
to China and vice versa - as another thrash-China
club. In an article titled "World Bank tells China
to reform state sector to ensure stability" (I'm
pretty sure the print-edition headline was just
"World Bank tells China to reform"), the LA Times'
Dave Pierson and Don Lee wrote:
The World Bank, taking aim at one of
China's most entrenched interest groups, told
the country's top leadership that it had to
reform the nation's powerful state sector to
ensure stability in the world's fastest-growing
major economy.
China's economic model
was "unsustainable," the World Bank said ...
The PRC leadership is probably
thinking that next time, instead of investing
hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of
cadre-hours into helping the World Bank write its
report, it would have a better chance of getting
its message across (and perhaps receiving a more
sympathetic hearing from the Western media) if it
just bought expensive full-page ads in the LA
Times and a few other influential papers.
The World Bank report said a lot of nice
things about China's economic development. The
Executive Summary begins:
China's economic performance over
the past 30 years has been remarkable. It is a
unique development success story, providing
valuable lessons for other countries seeking to
emulate this success - lessons about the
importance of adapting to local initiative and
interregional competition; integrating with the
world; adjusting to new technologies; building
world-class infrastructure; and investing
heavily in its people.
In the next 15 to
20 years, China is well positioned to join the
ranks of the world's high-income countries.
China's policymakers are already focused on how
to change the country's growth strategy to
respond to the new challenges that will come,
and avoid the "middle income trap". [2]
The "middle income trap" is the
anxiety that as Chinese labor costs increase,
exports become less competitive, productivity
gains stall, incomes stagnate, and the economy
gets stuck in a rut.
The World Bank report
identifies an exclusive club of economies that
were able to make the post-World War II jump from
"middle income" to "high income": Equatorial
Guinea, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan,
Mauritius, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Republic of
Korea, Singapore, Spain and Taiwan.
That
list might need some revision next year if Greece
completes its austerity-accelerated economic
collapse - and if a major Eurocession brings ruin
to Ireland, Portugal and Spain.
The key to
escaping the middle-income trap is innovation,
according to the World Bank.
The balance
of the report is pretty much a primer on how to
convert China into a nimble, innovating, dancing
dragon instead of a fat, lumbering state-owned
panda.
The stated characteristics of the
World Bank's "new strategy" are: quality of growth
(more social goods); balanced growth (more
services and consumption, less capital-intensive,
export-led growth); innovation and creativity;
"unleashing China's full human potential" (a code
phrase for reducing the overweening dominance of
the big state enterprises in economic life and
giving the other feller a chance); and role of
market, rule of law, social values, and high moral
standards (but no mention of democracy).
At times, the report reads like Barack
Obama campaign literature:
The third new strategic direction is
that China should "grow green". Instead of
considering environmental protection and
climate-change mitigation as burdens that hurt
competitiveness and slow growth, this report
stresses that green development could
potentially become a significant new growth
opportunity ... China intends to grow green by
following a pattern of economic growth that
boosts environmental protection and
technological progress, a strategy that could
become an example to other developing countries
and perhaps even advanced economies [page
21].
More to the point, China 2030 is
a political document that reflects the priorities
of the progressive wing of the Chinese leadership,
as endorsed by the wonks of the World Bank.
In Wen Jiabao's speech, he echoed the
report as he identified the priorities for 2012:
We will continue to balance
maintaining steady and robust economic
development, adjusting the economic structure,
and managing inflation expectations; accelerate
the transformation of the pattern of economic
development and adjustment of the economic
structure; vigorously expand domestic demand,
particularly consumer demand; make every effort
to strengthen innovation, energy conservation,
and emissions reduction; and strive to deepen
reform and opening up and ensure and improve the
people's well-being. [3]
In his key
tasks for 2012, Wen identified the first priority
as "work[ing] hard to increase consumer
demand".
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