China plan to make sure the caboose doesn't fall too far behind
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 at 8:39PM ■"China Hopes Economy Plan Will Bridge Income Gap: Wages in cities are now three times the levels of rural areas," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A5.
■"Chinese Leaders Set Out Priorities, Citing Challenges: Communist Party Produces Ambitious List to Address Social, Economic Inequities," by Kathy Chen and Cui Rong, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A14.
The highest ranks of the Chinese Communist Party have taken the unusual step of describing the next five years as the key transition period during which the country must "grasp opportunities to . . . seriously solve outstanding conflicts and problems on the road ahead."
As I said to the Chinese last summer, the train's engine cannot travel faster than its caboose, and when the Party talks about "harmonious and sustainable development," that's what it's referring to: the rural poor, or the caboose in danger of being left behind by the country's rapid embrace of globalization.
This is caboose braking--big time.
Expect a war with China any time soon? Sounds like the Fourth Generation of Leadership has enough on its plate right now, huh? It wants to double per capita GDP from its 2000 level by 2010, and decrease energy consumption per dollar of GDP by 20% in the next five years. America wants to reform its social security, but China wants to create a basic social security system.
As the NYT piece put it, "China's market-oriented economy has partly outgrown the traditional five-year planning documents that used to control nearly all allocations of money, resources and talent." That basically means that most local authorities do what they damn well please, no matter what Beijing says.
Still, if China is no longer really on the five-year plan, then that really leaves only the Pentagon as a centrally-planned economy.
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