The 2016 NPC meeting - getting the message across
- By Kerry Brown
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 5, 2016
Putting these issues together - worries over growth, and the embedding of the 13th Five Year Plan - matches up two issues, one hopefully short term (public nerves) and one long term (launching the Plan). What unites them is the centrality of communication, of clear expression of policy lines running into the future, and of government commitment to them.
The leadership since late 2012 have been clear in expressing their political goals - achieving the centennial targets in 2021 and 2049, ensuring that China remains stable and unified, and improving the Communist Party's governance of itself through an anti-corruption struggle. Ideological messaging has increased, through leadership speeches, and in the media.
However, on the economic side, the message has been more blurred and harder to interpret. Part of this is due to uncertainty in the global situation. But there are also internal concerns. One of the main themes here is clarifying the role of the market. In the 2013 Plenum of the 18th CPC Central Committee, the Party's communiqué stated clearly that China was committed to the irrevocable role of the market in reform and modernizing the economy. However, over the last year, there has evidently been division amongst Chinese economists and officials in where the new parameters of the market are. Both in the liberalizing of China's RMB rate, and in the stock exchange, there have been those who have argued for intervention, and those who believe that the market, and the market alone, needs to be the prime driver.
The NPC this year has to convey a message more clearly of what the role of the market within China currently is. Will marketization be taking place, for instance, in utility prices? In what ways will state owned enterprises be further reformed through exposure to market competition? How will non-state companies be able to work with state ones to create more hybrid ownership models? Will marketization penetrate the all important financial services sector, and are Chinese banks, mostly state owned, prepared for this?
These are hugely important questions. Market discipline may well improve productivity in China, and the efficient deployment of capital. But of course, if left unbridled, it will also create risks. The role of government is to try to find a happy medium. China's main task is still to achieve the best quality, sustainable growth it can - sustainability and the further challenges of greening the Chinese economy will be another theme of this year's NPC - but it cannot do that by taking reckless chances. A lot is at stake, for China and the world, in the reforms it is currently attempting. This year's NPC therefore will be a success if messages addressed to the plans about maintaining growth even while it is dipping, and what the core areas of the next five year plan will be are heard by the Chinese public and the outside world, and, more importantly, understood and trusted.
Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute, King's College, London, and associate fellow, Chatham House, London, on the Asia Programme.
Opinion article reflected the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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