Читать книгу What Does China Think? - Mark Leonard - Страница 14

Zhang Weiying was not the only person to call for ‘dual-track pricing’, but he was the first to do it publicly. He was soon given a plum job working for the Commission for State Institutional Reform which he held down from 1984 until 1990. Zhang Weiying was part of a group of young officials who found ways of making market ideas palatable to the older Communist elite. Their goal was to paint as many zebras as possible – to create a parallel market in the shell of socialist China.

China’s economic reforms had begun in the countryside with the dissolution of the ‘people’s communes’ and the end of collective farms in 1979. For over two decades before then, life in the countryside had been organized around collective ‘work units’ which lived together, worked together and ate together. The work unit was meant to replace the family as the primary unit of economic activity and social life. With the ‘opening and reform era’, these collective farms were closed down and replaced with smallholdings that were controlled by individual families who could decide what they wanted to grow, and more importantly kept the profits generated by their labour. This led to a huge surge in agricultural productivity which freed thousands of labourers from the fields. These workers were soon employed by a new crop of privately run factories – known as ‘Town and Village Enterprises’ – which sprang up all over the countryside. The wealth generated by China’s rural revolution allowed the local governments to benefit from the revenue generated by private industry. But these primitive trysts with the market were not what excited Zhang Weiying and his colleagues. This was just the beginning.

In their quest for a new China they looked beyond the landlocked rural plains where economic reform had begun to the outward-facing coastal provinces of the east. At the beginning of the 1980s, Shenzhen was an unremarkable fishing village, providing a meagre living for its few thousand inhabitants. Over the next three decades it has become an emblem of the Chinese capitalism that Zhang Weiying and his colleagues were building. Because of its proximity to Hong Kong, Deng Xiaoping chose Shenzhen as the first ‘Special Economic Zone’, offering its leaders tax-breaks, freedom from government regulation and a licence to pioneer new market ideas. The architects of reform in Shenzhen were not interested in replicating the low-tech industrial revolution that had taken place in the countryside at the beginning of the era of ‘opening and reform’. They wanted to build high-tech, capital intensive plants that could mass-produce the sort of high-value-added goods that could compete directly with the West. In order to get their hands on the technology and capital to turn their dreams into reality, the authorities set about attracting investment from abroad. Shenzhen alone succeeded in pulling in over $30 billion of foreign money to build factories and roads and develop its ports. The secret of Shenzhen’s success was its reliance on exports, rather than domestic consumption to fuel its growth. The decision to open the ‘Special Economic Zones’ up to the outside world provided a booster for the development of a non-state sector because foreign companies would set up joint ventures and shareholding companies. As a result, by 1992 half of China’s industrial output was generated by the non-state sector.

This pattern of building zones of radical experimentation to gradually produce more valuable goods and services was the key to China’s success. It was very capital intensive, and needed to be financed by drawing on the country’s massive savings and the revenues from exports rather than domestic consumption. It was based on the commodification of labour, as the coastal regions could suck in endless numbers of workers from the countryside in order to depress urban salaries. And it was laissez-faire – allowing wealth to trickle down from the rich to the poor organically rather than consciously redistributing it. Deng Xiaoping pointedly declared that ‘some must get rich first’, arguing that the different regions should ‘eat in separate kitchens’ rather than putting their resources into a ‘common pot’. As a result, the reformers of the eastern provinces were allowed to cut free from the impoverished inland areas and steam ahead.

The take-off of the coastal regions seemed to back up the claims of generations of Chinese reformers that their country had been held back by the conservatism of its inland provinces, which prevented China from competing with maritime civilizations such as Britain, France, Japan and the USA which had embraced the market, trade and innovation. The reforms of the 1980s unleashed a process of social change that went far beyond economics. The Chinese called it a ‘cultural fever’. It reached a cresc-endo in June 1988 with the showing of a six-part documentary called River Elegy in prime-time on the main state television channel. The series used the story of the Yellow River – often referred to as ‘mother river’ because it is considered to be the cradle of Chinese civilization – to launch a full-frontal attack on China’s traditions.

Rather than accepting the romantic ideal of the Yellow River as the embodiment of Chinese greatness, the series presented it – with its countless victims from flooding and drought – as an enemy of the Chinese people; the ultimate symbol of their irrational, erratic and earth-oriented character. Each episode targeted a Chinese tradition that was holding the country back. For example, the Great Wall was treated as a symbol of meaningless isolation, while the Ming dynasty was attacked for its ban on maritime activity. The pungent style of the narrator drove this point home in the very first episode: ‘There is a blind spot in our national psyche: it is a vague belief that all of the shame of the past century is the result of a break in our glorious history. Ever since 1840, there have been people who have used the splendours and greatness of the past to conceal the feebleness and backwardness of our present state … Yet the fact remains, our civilization is moribund.’ The narrators pleaded with China to break the bonds of traditional society that had prevented the country’s modernization. China, they argued, must now turn away from the countryside, focusing not on the Yellow River, but rather on the blue world of the ocean and the world beyond. The final images of the series show the Yellow River dissolving into the powerful sea which symbolizes the might of the Western world which has embraced modernity. In China’s universities and colleges, students spontaneously discussed and debated the issues raised in each episode of River Elegy. Five million copies of the script were sold as it became an instant best-seller. The reformist prime minister Zhao Ziyang arranged for the series to be re-aired on the main TV channel, Chinese Central Television.

Less than a year after the series was aired, the cultural fever took a decidedly political turn in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. What began as a memorial march for the former Communist Party Secretary General Hu Yaobang on 15 April soon turned into a catch-all protest for political reform, workers’ rights and an end to official corruption. This incredible display of people power that dominated the streets of Beijing for six weeks gave the world a glimpse of a democratic China until it was abruptly wiped out by soldiers and tanks on 4 June 1989. The crackdown was more than a human tragedy; it became a defining moment in China’s political and economic development.