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毛泽东藉由分化中国人民成为小单位并使其孤立，以巩固他个人的权力。在当今现代化的社会，他们正在倒退中。这也许成为这三十年改革下的重要遗产，也是毛泽东最害怕之事。
毛泽东也害怕中国人民寻求自治。许多人认为中国人还没准备好实行民主制度。但，这是错误的想法。刘晓波获得诺贝尔和平奖——这个对于中国人是令人激奋的响应，即是对于中国已经准备好真正的选举、言论与法律自由最明确的肯定。
我如何知道呢？我在北京奥运前回去我父亲的故乡——如皋市，当时没有人想要谈论这个被戏称为“政府的比赛”的奥运。相反地，几乎每个人问起我的太太、美国政治体制如何运作以及下一届美国总统选举谁将获胜。他们想要知道任何有关麦肯（John McCain）与欧巴马的事情。
简言之，中国人民想要一番新气象。且，无论如何，中国人民终将胜利。
中国有一天终将自由，且这个时刻即将到来。
本文为台湾发展与文化交流协会二零一零年十一月十一日至十三日假台北市天母会议中心主办《中国民主化展望与探索》国际会议专文
Is China Rising or Falling?
Gordon G. Chang
Is China rising or is it falling?
Today, I am going to challenge the most fundamental assumption people make
about China. Just about everyone says China is rising and that this is “China’s century.”
To see if this assumption is correct, it would help to have a little historical perspective. So I’m going to give you a short history of the world during the last four decades, and I’m going to do all this through the lens of my life.
I graduated college in 1973. The year is significant because that was the time of the Arab oil embargo and the turmoil in global petroleum markets. When I got out of school, I just knew I was going to be working for some sheik for the rest of my life.
Then we fast forward to the end of the 1980s. I was practicing law in Hong Kong. My firm did a lot of work for Tokyo banks, and almost all of my partners were caught up in the Japan craze. Then, it seemed as if the Japanese were going to take over the world.
And there was plenty of evidence suggesting that was going to happen. The Emperor’s Imperial Palace, not even 250 acres, was valued at more than all the real estate in California; land in Japan in 1990 was worth fifty percent more than the remainder of the planet; the value of stocks listed in Tokyo exceeded the combined value of those listed in New York, Frankfurt, London, Paris, and Toronto; and all of the world’s ten largest banks were Japanese as were its four largest securities companies.
The Japanese people went wild, importing ice cubes from Antarctica and buying everyone’s else’s icons.
That’s why everyone talked about “the Japanese century.”
I wasn’t interested in geopolitics then, but I knew that Japan would falter. How did I gain this remarkable insight that had somehow eluded the world’s smartest people? Simple, I realized I was not then working for Arabs. I had seen all this hysteria before, just with a different cast of characters.
And I knew something then that people are forgetting now: that all bubbles burst.
But now the world is at it again. People leap from the statement that “demography is destiny” to the conclusion that a China five times more populous than the United States will have an economy five times larger.
I disagree. I say we need to look at the broad sweep of events.
Despite all the economic reform in China that we see on the surface, the political system has changed remarkably little underneath. Mao Zedong created an abnormal society. But he was at least enough of a realist to surround his new republic with high and strong walls so that it could survive almost indefinitely on the inside. His successors have sought to create a more modern nation. But they have not changed the Maoist system, where the Communist Party dictates and the people are supposed to follow. Yet at the same time China’s new leaders are successively opening the country. As they do so, all the forces that apply around the world—political, economic, and social—are beginning to apply in China as well. At some point in this process this centrally directed system will fail. It’s as if Mao tried to abolish the law of gravity by decree in his new republic. As the country is opened up by his successors, gravity is applying in China.
By now, this process of change has acquired its own momentum—the Communist Party can no longer stop it. And as it continues, the People’s Republic is beginning to take on the look, and even some of the feel, of the modern world. In short, China is becoming less Chinese.
So the issue today is not whether the central government is doing the right things or the wrong things. The issue is time. In a short period of time, the next few years, China will face many challenges, some of them unprecedented. Let’s discuss six of them.
First, the economy is on a trajectory with few good outcomes. Because predictions of China’s rise are predicated on its world-beating economy, we need to spend time to see what is actually going on.
We’ll start with exports, until recently, the most important of the three legs of the Chinese economy.
Last year, China’s exports dropped 16.0 percent. And the prospect for the intermediate future is, at best, uncertain. Chinese exports skyrocketed in the December-to-September period, but that was off a low base and the momentum is unlikely to last beyond this year due to fragile global demand.
Demand is fragile not only in developed economies but also in emerging ones. Moreover, demand could take an especially hard hit if we enter the second part of a double-dip downturn, which is looking increasingly likely.
In good times, an export economy is a blessing. In bad ones, however, it is a curse. As we saw in the Great Depression, it was the current account-surplus countries that had the hardest time adjusting to deteriorating economic conditions and, consequently, suffered the most. That will prove to be the case now as well. China’s economic model, which delivered prosperity in a period of seemingly unending growth, is particularly ill-suited to current conditions.
To meet the challenges of these conditions, Beijing, in July of 2008, adopted protectionist measures. That is already causing its trade partners to think of retaliation. China is more dependent on international commerce than almost any other nation, so a global trade war will hurt the Chinese more than others.
And a global trade war could be coming. We have to remember that China’s exports boomed in the post-Cold War era. In this unusually benign period, countries wanted to integrate China into the international system and were indulgent, tolerating its mercantilist policies.
But we have left that time of uninterrupted growth. Now, every nation wants to export more. President Obama, in his State of the Union message this year, announced a goal of doubling American exports in the next five years with his National Export Initiative. In short, Obama wants America to become just like China. So we will not let China be China anymore.
In an era of protectionism or of managed trade—whatever you wish to label it—
China will not be able to export its way to prosperity, as it did in the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the last decade.
Analysts, by and large, don’t worry about the coming falloff in exports. They say the central government can stimulate domestic consumption to take up the slack.
Beijing says it wants to increase consumption. But we need to look at the facts. In fact, consumption’s role in the economy has been sliding, dropping from its historical average of about 60 percent to about 30 percent today. No country has a lower rate. And the steps the central government is taking to stimulate exports—like holding down the value of its currency—inevitably discourage consumption. Moreover, the government’s stimulus program, which focuses on building infrastructure and industrial production, is by definition anti-consumption.
In this environment, China’s consumers have in fact been cautious. It’s true that Beijing keeps issuing statistics showing retail sales increasing each and every month. In August, for example, they jumped 18.4 percent. But we must remember Beijing includes government procurement in retail sales numbers; central government statisticians have been counting factory production—in other words, unsold inventory—as retail sales; and from what we can tell, Chinese technocrats have been ordering localities and state enterprises to buy cars, and many of them are parked in lots across China, unused. That’s about the only credible explanation as to how the number of registered cars could increase 24 percent last year while gas sales went up only about 5 percent. The Chinese even have a name for the stored vehicles: “lot rot.”
And there is another problem in that the retail sales numbers have not been consistent with other data, especially last year when we saw persistent deflation, robust retail sales, and rapid monetary expansion all at the same time. That combination may be possible in another galaxy but not ours.
The overriding reality is that consumption cannot become significant until Beijing, in fact and not just in words, abandons its investment-led strategy.
And that gets us to the third leg of the Chinese economy, investment.
Beijing’s $586 billion stimulus plan is creating growth. In the first half of this year, for instance, the economy grew by an impressive 11.1 percent. As a result, the Chinese economy is now the second largest in the world, surpassing Japan’s in the second quarter of this year.
In its first full year of existence, Beijing’s stimulus program has, either directly or indirectly through the state banks, pumped, according to my calculations, $1.1 trillion into China’s $4.76 trillion economy.
There are a number of problems, however, with this “sugar high.” For one thing, all the spending is grossly inefficient.
Yet that is not its worst sin. The worst sin is that Beijing’s program is resulting in a bigger state economy and a smaller private one: about 95 percent of recent growth is attributable to investment, almost all of it from the state. And state investment is going into the state sector, of course. The state’s stimulus plan is favoring large state enterprises over small and medium-sized private firms, and state financial institutions are diverting credit to state-sponsored infrastructure.
Over the last 30 years, China’s economy has expanded at an average annual rate of 9.9 percent because of the private sector, but now Beijing is renationalizing the economy with state cash. As they say, “the Party is now the economy.” Renationalization will have negative consequences for Chinese growth, if not soon then at least over the next few years.
And the flood of stimulus money has created dislocations and imbalances, such as the property market bubble, that will be difficult to unwind.
One final point about the Chinese economy. Some argue that the troubles will soon be forgotten because the economy is in a supercycle upward. Yes, China was in a supercycle, but that has ended.
Why? By far the most important reason is that China has turned it back on its proven formula for success. President Hu Jintao has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and opening up” as he embraces a new economic paradigm of closing the country down. Beijing, these days, is building up its so-called “national champions” and
restricting opportunities for foreign business.
And economic reform? There’s not much of it. The best you can say is that they are tinkering.
Because Beijing still retains significant control over the economy, central technocrats can, through a hundred different techniques, manage outcomes. Yet they cannot avoid the inevitable. And by postponing the adjustments that must occur, they are making the final reckoning worse. State-led economies always work—until they do not. When they do not, they fall apart fast.
I mentioned there were six problems. The second one is China faces trade difficulties as other nations insist that Beijing stop violating its World Trade Organization obligations and as they are increasingly unwilling to accept defective products and poisonous foods.
Third, the domestic banking system is in trouble. China’s official nonperforming loan ratio—1.3 percent at the end of the first half of this year—is a fantasy. They have gone back to rolling over questionable loans.
And there are a lot of questionable loans to rollover. The $586 billion stimulus plan, as we all know, resulted in an explosion of lending to “beauty-show projects” that had little economic viability.
Last year, Chinese banks lent 95.3 percent more than they did in 2008. This year, despite a clampdown, lending is running only a little behind last year’s torrid pace. Every time there has been a lending surge of this dimension, a banking crisis has followed.
As history also demonstrates, eventually financial flows reverse. When they do so—and look for this to happen sometime at the end of this year or the beginning of the next one—we could see a crisis of historic proportions.
Fourth, the nation’s social security system is inadequate, in some ways even in worse shape than the banks. Beijing will need to come up with $1.2 trillion, give or take a few hundred billion dollars, in the years ahead to provide benefits. This is true even though Beijing has made progress in funding its obligations in the last half decade.
Moreover, China faces a demographic problem that will make it difficult to raise funds to support a rapidly aging society. People often talk about the disastrous social consequences of the brutally enforced one-child policy—prostitution, trafficking in women, HIV, for instance—but they often forget it has serious economic effects as well.
China’s workforce will level off in about 2013, and the country will begin to shrink around 2025, maybe even 2020. A shrinking population will, in all probability, mean shrinking GDP and less money for benefits.
The country has already benefited from its “demographic dividend,” an extraordinary bulge in the country’s workforce. Soon there will be a heavy “demographic tax” when one worker supports two parents and four grandparents. Demography may not be destiny, but it will create high barriers for China.
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