11月14日，复旦大学经济学院院长、中国社会主义市场经济研究中心主任张军教授在Project Syndicate官网上发表文章：30年后的中国(China’s Vision for the Next 30 Years）。
报业辛迪加（Project Syndicate）被称为“世界上最具智慧的专栏”，作者来自全球顶级经济学者、诺奖得主、政界领袖，主题包括全球政治、经济、科学与文化塑造者的观点，为全球读者提供来自全球最高端的原创文章、最具深度的评论，为解读“变动中的世界”提供帮助。
以下为文章全文:
Achieving the lofty development goals
China's leaders have set will not be easy. But with a clear development
blueprint and a powerful leader whose political clout all but guarantees
continued reform, the country seems to be in a strong position to sustain its
unprecedented economic success in the coming decades.
Every five years, the Communist Party of
China convenes a National Congress, where two key decisions are made: who will
lead China for the next five years, and what path to development those leaders
will follow. The CPC's recently completed 19th National Congress did all that
and more.
Beyond choosing the next Politburo Standing
Committee, the 19th Party Congress reelected President Xi Jinping as the CCP's
leader and added his eponymous ideology – “Xi Jinping Thought” – to the Party's
charter. The Congress also produced a blueprint for the country's future
development until 2050, one that reflects the changes that economic reform and
opening have brought to China.
At the CPC's 13th National Congress, in
October 1987, China's leaders declared that the “major contradictions” facing
the country were those between “people's growing material and cultural needs
and the backwardness of social production.” In other words, the key challenge
was to produce enough food, clothing, and books for all Chinese.
Thirty years later, the major contradiction
China faces is that between “rising demand for higher standards of living and
the constraints imposed by insufficient and unbalanced economic development.”
In his address to the 19th Party Congress, Xi declared that, because China can
largely deliver basic necessities to its people, the goal now should be to
improve their quality of life.
With that in mind, the 19th Congress
charted a new roadmap, based on the “two centennial goals” inherited from the
18th Congress. The first centennial goal is to build a “moderately prosperous
society” (xiao-kang) by 2021, the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding. The
key here is to ensure broad prosperity, with poverty all but eliminated.
The second centennial goal is to transform
China into a “fully developed and advanced nation” by 2049, the 100th
anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. The vision, confirmed at
the Congress, is for China to be a prosperous, civilized, harmonious, and
modern socialist society, boasting strong governance. Such a China would be a
leading global power, ranking high among the advanced economies.
The 19th Party Congress went some way
toward marking the path between these two goals, asserting that once the first
centennial goal is realized, China's next task will be to modernize Chinese
society by 2035. Such a modern China would be a world leader in innovation,
with a clean environment, a large middle class, and a much narrower gap between
rural and urban growth, public services, and living standards.
Achieving these goals will require, first
and foremost, that China's leadership understands where in the development
process China is. In this sense, it is promising that China's leaders admitted
at the latest Congress that China is and will remain in the primary phase of
socialism. China must, therefore, put development first, with the expectation
that economic growth will solve the country's problems.
Given this, China's top leaders promised
that they would continue implementing structural reforms and advancing economic
liberalization. This builds on a resolution, adopted at the Third Plenary
Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in 2013, to give the market the
“decisive role” in allocating resources.
As the 19th Party Congress acknowledged,
honoring these commitments will require China to protect private property
rights and entrepreneurship. The importance of this is highlighted by the fact
that the private sector contributes more than 60% of China's GDP, 50% of its
taxes, 70% of its technological and product innovations, and 80% of its jobs,
despite accounting for less than 40% of inputs.
As for liberalization, China is committed
to implementing policies to open up further its markets to trade and foreign
investment, while protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign
investors. As part of this effort, the government is authorizing further free-trade
zones, and exploring the possibility of free-trade ports in selected locations.
It is believed that China is on track to
achieve its goal of becoming a high-income economy by 2035. But it will have to
sustain labor productivity growth of at least 5% annually for the next 15-20
years – an outcome that will depend on rising urbanization and deepening
technological progress.
The key to success will be a Chinese
leadership that adapts effectively to changing internal and external conditions
and manages the risks that have accumulated in recent decades. For example, it
must tackle growing income inequality, driven largely by the massive disparity
between urban and rural incomes, though the income gap among urban residents is
also widening. In 2014, per capita income was CN¥53,300 ($8,024) for the top 5%
households and just CN¥1,600 for the poorest 5%.
According to China Household Financial
Survey data, China's Gini coefficient – the most common measure of inequality –
climbed from 0.283 in 1983 to 0.491 in 2008, reaching highs of 0.61 in 2010 and
0.60 in 2012 (much higher than the official figures of 0.481 and 0.474,
respectively). Though the Gini coefficient dropped to 0.465 by 2016, that still
exceeds the 0.24-0.36 range for major developed economies.
China also faces increasing wealth
disparity. In 1988 and 1995, China's Gini coefficient of household wealth was
just 0.34 and 0.4, respectively. But the coefficient has grown, peaking at
0.739 in 2010. By 2014, the poorest 25% of households owned less than 2% of the
country’s total wealth, while the top 1% owned one third.
If China fails to contain inequality, its
long-term growth could suffer. But with a clear development blueprint and a
powerful leader whose political clout all but guarantees continued reform,
China might be in a strong position to address the challenges it faces and
sustain its unprecedented economic success.
Yet, even if China achieves its goals for
2050, the challenge will not be over, as China's leaders will then have to
contend with an aging population. By 2050, 36.5% of China's population will be
over the age of 60, according to the 2017 revision of the United Nations’ World
Population Prospects. The median age may be as high as 49.6, quite close to
Japan's 53.3 and higher than in the Sweden, the United Kingdom, European Union
as a whole, and the United States. This makes it all the more crucial for
China's leaders to make the right decisions and put their country on a stable
footing by 2050.
文章来源：Project Syndicate
原文链接：https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-19th-congress-development-blueprint-by-zhang-jun-2017-11/chinese
