'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.

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.