Time to rejoice - and reflect

Special report: 30 Years of Reform Opening Up

Students from Beijing Nationality

University pose for pictures at a photo exhibition in the capital city's

Wangfujing area yesterday. The show features about 800 photos taken across

the country during the past three decades to highlight the major changes

China has gone through since 1978.(Chinese media Photo)
Photo Gallery

BEIJING, Dec.18 -- Today's celebrations marking

the 30th anniversary of China's reform and opening up should have been euphoric

for the country and the world - for the benefits to both are all too apparent.

Instead, amid the global economic gloom, they will be

muted.

The decoupling theory has gone out of the bedroom

window as economies around the world find themselves in a tighter embrace than

before.

So in China, there will be some inevitable grouses

about how reform and opening up have not brought home riches and ever-rising

prosperity to all.

The laid-off State enterprise worker would no doubt

prefer the days of job and perk security for life. The Dongguan toy factory

worker will wonder whether the sacrifice of leaving home for a job thousands of

kilometers away only for his overseas boss to decamp overnight is worth it.

State-owned enterprises, brought to the altar of the

marketplace - some eagerly, some reluctantly - in ongoing market reform will be

carefully evaluating their position. They are global market players seeking

innovation, adequate levels of capital, the right technology and marketing

strategies; yet there are calls all round for them not to lay off any workers -

indeed, not even cut year-end bonuses.

No doubt, as top leaders gather today at the Great

Hall of the People to mark the epoch-making day 30 years after the country

decided on reforms and opening up to the world, there will be somber reflection

along with a strong sense of achievement.

They will stress the remarkable progress charted over

the 30 years; and, as they set the agenda for the coming years, will most likely

point out that the need is for more reform, not less.

Yes, there have been birth pangs; and there will be

growing pains. As Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the reforms, presciently said

in 1993, we will encounter more problems as we develop than we would if were in

a state of under-development.

But the phenomenal success of the reform and opening

up is not remotely in doubt - few who have seen the changes, either in China or

overseas, have questions about its historic significance.

Mere statistical evidence is jaw-dropping. Simply

put, never in history have the lives of so many millions been transformed in

such a short period.

More compellingly, it is about people - once helpless

individuals starting up their own business, poor villages becoming better-off

communities, sleepy towns thriving in modern manufacturing and winning contracts

worldwide.

Poverty, a legacy from the wars and social turmoil in

most of the 20th century, has been effectively reduced, as national welfare

programs, such as health and education, continue to be improved.

A modern market economy, for all its inadequacies,

has been providing increasing choices and opportunities for the world's largest

working population.

In contrast, 30 years ago, many people had questions

and even quite serious doubts. Conflicting reports about China were printed side

by side in newspapers.

Now, it would be instructive to recall some of the

skeptical, if not cynical, comments that China once heard from overseas and

compare them with reality.

Many of those comments are no longer heard. But at

one time or another, they were being recycled at a high frequency. Maybe they

should not be all forgotten, as occasionally revisiting them may help people

better appreciate the uniqueness of the Chinese reform experience.

In the early 1980s, when reform was being urged by

Deng and his colleagues, one standard remark according to the new line of the

Chinese leadership was "neither donkey nor horse".

How could an economy which, up to that day, only

featured centralized planning and control shift to incorporate market forces?

How could a society where nearly every wall on the

street was painted with ideologically-charged slogans allow individuals to dream

of material incentives?

How could a people with more than 80 percent of them

still living in the countryside doing work not much different from 1,000 years

earlier, pursue modernization?

By throwing together ideas borrowed from disparate

systems, those people used to say, China could only become a strange combination

of contradictions. There might even be a danger of the country continuing to be

bogged down in endless internal conflicts.

On the surface, the commentators were certainly

right. Through the initial decade or so, Chinese economists introduced a huge

number of experimental projects - based on inspiration from the former

Yugoslavia, Hungary, Scandinavia, the United States, Japan, and the so-called

"little tigers" of Asia - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan.

Many of the experiments did not come to fruition and

were merged with other experiments. Retrospectively speaking, it does not

matter, actually, how they worked out - so long as they could meet one

criterion, most concisely summarized by Deng, that "poverty is not socialism".

Or, socialism allows for no poverty. So all the

efforts, not just economists' experiments, but all villages', all factories',

and all citizens' attempts to seek the kind of mix and remix of economic

inspirations that they felt comfortable with.

'Re-inventing the

wheel'

In the mid-1990s, the reforms looked precarious.

Citizens were disgruntled - with the rampant official corruption (though far

from eradicated now), fake merchandise, and painful progress of State-owned

enterprises. Why not, some critics said, transplant a ready system from a mature

market economy? Why must we try to re-invent the wheel?

However, society is not a machine. There is no ready

design, moreover, to transform a formerly rural society with a vast population

of so much diversity, into an orderly, competitive market system. In many

aspects, people have to go through many ups and downs together to form a shared

experience, and learn to work with each other.

A man pays a floral tribute to a statue

of China's late leader Deng Xiaoping in Guang'an of Sichuan

province.(Photo: China Daily)
Photo

Gallery

Chinese had deep suspicion of the high-profile short cuts to the market economy,

like the Russian shock therapy. Guided by their farmers' wisdom, they opted for

a seemingly go-slow strategy. Reform is the goal, of course, but it should be

pursued in such a way as to benefit development. Only development can convince

the people, as Deng famously told his audience during the last inspection tour

of his life in 1992.

But in only a seemingly go-slow decade, a fair number

of once bureaucratic State-owned enterprises were restructured, with shares

issued to the public, in exchanges in New York, Hong Kong, London, Singapore as

well as Shanghai and Shenzhen.

In the meantime, large numbers of privately-held

small enterprises, including technology startups, sprang up along the coast.

Small enterprises, in manufacturing and in service industries, have become the

hotbed of new urban jobs, redirecting former rural labor forces into the cities.

Whenever feasible, international norms and practices

were also imported, and not in small measure. In 2001, the accession to the WTO

provided China with an important window of learning.

To use the metaphor again, China didn't buy a whole

wheel from abroad. But more and more parts of the made-in-China wheel are of the

world's standard design.

'Adam Smith on

steroids'

Now we come to the new century. With its newly earned

importance in global trade - along with all the positive and negative reports

about made-in-China goods, American politicians coined a new name for China -

"Adam Smith on steroids".

One side of phrase is a clear acknowledgement that

China is now a competitive economy - does anyone still remember how meager the

nation's import and export volume was 30 years ago? It was, in dollar terms,

only less than three days' business nowadays. In other words, China's foreign

trade grew from a little more than $20 billion in 1978 to an estimated $2,720

billion in 2008.

In terms of GDP, the primary measurement of a

country's economic might, China's 2008 record is estimated at 27,078.8 billion

yuan, more than 70 times the 1978 figure.

There is another side of the coin, admittedly:

Concerns about quality, such as tainted milk, which sneaked through the age-old

quality inspection system and did harm to at least 290,000 babies in this

country.

Chinese do not shy away from the fact that in many

corners of their land, there may have been growth in money or in numbers, but

hardly as much benefit to the customers and the workers.

In 2003, it was amid the public health crisis of SARS

(severe acute respiratory syndrome) that the central government first raised the

principle of "people first".

People should be the purpose of all development. That

is why more resources (though they never seem enough) are being committed to

such mass social security programs as rural medical care and schools, aid for

the low-income and jobless, and environmental protection and emission control.

Laws are being enacted and amended to better protect

citizens' economic rights, the recent one on farmers' land-use rights and their

autonomous cooperatives, for example.

Much of the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package that

Beijing has designed to cope with the global financial crisis features no more

costly and energy-consuming projects. Most of them, as public infrastructure

projects, have a very clear emphasis on the development of quality of life in

urban and rural settings.

(Source: China Daily)