China

8 Pages 2030 Words

“IF YOU think,” says a high administration official in Washington, DC, “what will be required for economic success in the globalisation that is exploding around us—technically dynamic, information-rich, highly entrepreneurial—then the winners in that environment will be those able to provide at least the following...” He counts on his fingers. “Free access to global information and markets. Protection of physical and intellectual property. People able to speak and associate freely. A government that has sufficient legitimacy to feel comfortable joining the global economy. An educated population. And a rules-based polity...This is a set of qualities that does not conform to a highly authoritarian system.” That, put simply, is the case for political change in China.
In the past few years, two uncertainties about China have cleared themselves up. The first is that China’s central government has committed itself wholeheartedly, irrevocably and (to all but the dimmest apparatchiks) unambiguously to creating a market economy at home, tied to the world at large. This is not because China’s septuagenarian leaders, all former central planners, have become born-again liberals (although a surprising number of liberals are moving up through the ranks). Rather, the remnant Maoists have long been banished to the wings, from where they shout ineffectually from time to time. Meanwhile, the remaining dominant factions—whether their leaders are gung-ho reformers, cautious conservatives or nationalists who see economic success as the basis of future power projection—all agree on one thing: the Communist Party is history unless it can deliver growth. And for each of the past seven years now, China’s stellar economic growth has been slowing, risking unmanageable dissatisfaction amongst the people.
So Zhu Rongji, the prime minister, by temperament and training an engineer, not a free-marketeer, and popular neither with his peers i...