Opinion | Entrepreneurs are the hope of China’s economic future, so stop making ‘capital’ a dirty word
- Despite its role in supporting China’s economic boom, private capital still carries a whiff of notoriety in the country
- Private entrepreneurs are treated differently from state-owned enterprises, even though capital is what really drives the country’s growth
It is sometimes puzzling to find that many of the people who benefited a lot from China’s economic liberalisation still have strong feelings about the word “capital”, using it interchangeably with terms such as “greed”, “exploitation” or “evil”, depending on the context.
While the country officially regards capital as one of the production factors in its socialist economy along with land, technology and data, private capital is still sometimes seen as a source of social problems, such as income gap and moral corruption, while people who own capital are viewed with suspicion.
No one has come up with a real theory to counterbalance voices that say private capital in China must be curtailed, controlled and ultimately destroyed. According to the anti-capital camp, it is necessary for the Chinese state to clip the wings of capital at home and fight against capitalist powers abroad.
The capital detractors agree that capital may have utilitarian value in creating jobs and boosting economic growth, but it is fundamentally a necessary evil that needs to be kept in check by whatever means it takes.
After supporting China’s economic boom in the past four decades and gaining a certain degree of ideological neutrality along the way, capital is once again being defined according to the orthodoxy of Karl Marx, who described it as “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.
Such conceptual debate may seem abstract, but it has significant implications for policymaking. In China, whether a business is privately owned is sometimes still a decisive factor in determining whether it can win a contract or secure a bank loan.
