China must honour its pledge to let the market lead
Koichi Hamada says having come so far in raising growth and income levels, the Chinese government’s dictatorial decrees, market interventions and ineffective regulation all stand in the way of long-term solutions
In September, I visited China for the first time in nearly 10 years. With so much time having passed since my last visit, it was easy to see where China has prospered – and where it continues to struggle.
China’s major cities embody the extraordinary success of the development policies that Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) initiated in the 1980s. They are home to most of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who have been lifted out of extreme poverty in just a few decades. Beijing and Shanghai are almost overwhelming in their scale and energy, lined with shimmering skyscrapers, adorned with neon lights and teeming with increasingly cosmopolitan citizens.
Beijing and Shanghai are almost overwhelming in their scale and energy, lined with shimmering skyscrapers, and teeming with increasingly cosmopolitan citizens
But the impression I had of a modern economy was soon tarnished by an improperly working phone in a first-class Beijing hotel. An American friend suspected that it was tapped, probably because of my role as an adviser to the Japanese government.
Such claims are, of course, difficult to confirm, to say the least. What is not open to dispute is that a week after my trip ended, the number of the credit card that I had used for shopping in Beijing was used to make purchases at a Chinese supermarket in New York City. While identity theft is by no means exclusively a Chinese problem, such experiences create the impression that technological modernisation in China may be outpacing regulation and data security infrastructure.
READ MORE: For China’s struggling economy, 2016 may be worse than 2015
