Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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The December 1978 Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) might sound obscure, but its global repercussions were of seismic proportions. Deng Xiaoping’s series of economic policies, termed “reform and opening up”, went on to catapult China from an agricultural backwater into a manufacturing powerhouse that shapes the world’s economic architecture. As China celebrates the 40th anniversary of “reform and opening up”, it holds the world’s largest foreign reserves ($3.05 trillion in October), and boasts the second-largest economy (with a GDP of $12.2 trillion in 2017). Its share of the world’s economy has ballooned from 1.8% in 1978 to 18.2% in 2017. In doing so, it has defied decades of predictions that its uncomfortable blend of authoritarian politics and economic liberalisation was unsustainable. A country of contradictions Contemporary China is rife with contradictions. Its ruling party espouses a communist, egalitarian ideology while presiding over the emergence of a hugely unequal, capitalism-driven society. The divergent interests of the urban middle class clash with those of peasants and migrant workers. It has the world’s largest number of Internet users (more than 772 million) and accounts for more than 40% of global e-commerce transactions despite being one of the world’s most censored digital environments. And yet, the CPC has proved adept at squaring seeming circles and proved doomsday scenarios of its imminent collapse wrong, time and again. A crucial tool in achieving this feat has been the pilot project, poetically rendered as the Deng Xiaoping maxim, “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” This approach was characterised by experimentation and local policy tinkering, in order to establish what worked best in practice, before adoption at the national level. The special economic zones (SEZs) promoted along China’s coast in the 1980s, for example, were not brought into existence based on a priori assumptions about their theoretical utility. The idea was for them to be laboratories that provided a controlled environment within which experiments could be conducted boldly. Eventually SEZs became the locomotive for economic growth, attracting unprecedented flows of foreign investment and transforming fishing villages like Shenzhen into global manufacturing hubs. This approach was used repeatedly over the years to test new policies, from cooperative medical care schemes to abolishing controls on the movement of workers from the countryside to the cities. Consequently, the CPC swapped the kind of abrupt, ideologically based upheavals that characterised Mao Zedong’s mass movements from the 1950s to the 1970s, for pragmatic solutions that worked. What ‘worked’ was defined by certain parameters, most fundamentally the preservation of the CPC’s power. To this end, Beijing deployed a range of strategies including censorship and purges, but also the co-option of key constituencies like the urban middle class. By tying the prosperity of this group to the continuance of the party at the helm of policy-making, the CPC effectively neutralised what could have been its most formidable foe. Critically, what was found to work best for preserving power was delivering on promises of economic growth. This self-interested focus on performance continued as over time, the middle classes began to demand improvements in their quality of life beyond opportunities for material prosperity. The party responded by stepping up environmental protection. Beijing’s air pollution is a case in point. From being a poster boy for foul air, the Chinese capital has transformed into a model to be emulated by cities like Delhi.
