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The ‘Chinese Dream’ Deconstructed: Values and Institutions

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Abstract

The new Chinese leadership promised to deliver a ‘Chinese Dream’ with the rejuvenation and the prosperity of the Chinese nation and the happiness of the people as China’s development goals. While articulating the necessity of the further reform and opening-up, they also put an emphasis on the adherence to a ‘socialist way of Chinese characteristics’ in that the party leadership is regarded as its imperative. For the ‘Chinese Dream’ to be realized, a set of values were proclaimed, including prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship. Beside the existing institutions such as the system of democratic centralism, the CCP-led multi-party cooperation and system of people’s congresses, a set of new institutions were proclaimed as well, including a brand new ‘socialist’ system of rule of law and modern state governance system. This paper provides updated information and analysis of these newly proclaimed values and institutions, which serve an important new foundation for China to gain high economic efficiency, sustainable productivity, and escape from a ‘middle-income trap’, and support the endeavor to realize the ‘Chinese Dream’. However, its realization depends on whether the new leadership can successfully enforce a competitive market order and the rule of law in the years to come.

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Notes

  1. The World Bank even regards China as an upper-middle income country. Income groups of economies are divided in terms of 2012 GNI per capita, calculated using the World Bank Atlas method. The groups are: low income, $1035 or less; lower middle income, $1036–$4085; upper middle income, $4086–$12,615; and high income, $12,616 or more. See http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications. Retrieved on October 3, 2013.

  2. The renationalization of the economy has been strengthened from 2006. It is characterized by merging SOEs into large ones and granted most of them a status of government monopolies. They monopolized basic or key sectors such as petroleum or banking industry. Many of them occupy the key positions at the upper stream of industries so that private enterprises at the middle or lower stream and consumers have to take the prices that are dictated.

  3. According to Sachs et al. [42], China has been concentrated on technical imitation of ‘industrial pattern created by capitalist institutions in the absence of the capitalist institutional infrastructure’, instead of an institutional imitation, especially constitutional transition. Such a strategy can generate short-run impressive growth performance. However, as the potential for the imitation has been exhausted or as the network of division of labor becomes increasingly more complex, the long-run cost of this strategy will outweigh its short-run benefit since this system does not have an institutional infrastructure that can create its own capacity for economic development and institutional innovations. In the long run, a thorough constitutional transition is needed.

  4. See Xi [55]. Deng mentioned this during his visit to the Zhujiang Refrigerators Factory on January 29, 1992. This visit was a part of his famous ‘Southern Tour’ (nan xun) that spurred the momentum to the continuation and acceleration of China’s reform and opening-up after the crackdown of the 1989 student movement in China.

  5. After the change of the CCP leadership, the first eye-catching article against constitutionalism for China was written by Yang Xiaoqing [57] and published in Red Flag Articles on May 22, 2013. More such articles have been followed.

  6. Language poisoning can be seen in what took place in George Orwell’s famous novel ‘1984’. In the novel, the propaganda ministry of the dictatorship regime of the fictive country Oceania is called Ministry of Truth, or MiniTrue [39]. The ministry is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events.

  7. The Yongjia School which was born in the Southern Song Dynasty in Wenzhou is quite different from the mainstream thought of Confucianism. According to Ye Shi (1150–1223), the representative of that School, the pursuance of self interest based on some basic norms like trust and liability gives rise to a coordinated status, or harmony, which supports justice. He also stressed that one should not use ‘justice’ to suppress ‘self interest’. This notion is somewhat close to Adam Smith’s notion of ‘invisible hand’ [45].

  8. See Liew et al. [30], Russell [41] and Liang [29]. As Russell mentioned, China is ‘much less a political entity than a civilization’.

  9. According to the statistical data of the Ministry of Finance, the amount of the profits transferred by central government owned enterprises to the government is RMB 97.068 billion and the amount the central government transferred to them is RMB 92.979 billion in 2012. In the same year, the total amount of the accumulated profits of these enterprises is RMB 1504.54 billion ([3]; [60]).

  10. Socialism in terms of a planning economy is not able to solve the problem of cost-benefit-calculus because of lack of a functioning price system [36].

  11. According to Schumpeter [43], development implies changes in the system arisinge from within the system, not from external pressure. With this definition, he emphasized that adaptation to change in data (for instance growth in the economy due to population or wealth growth) is not development. In his notion, development necessitates new combinations ([43]: 66): introduction of a new good, or new quality of good, introduction of new method of production, the opening of new markets, conquest of new supply or raw materials or half-manufactured goods, and effecting the new organization of an industry (e.g. creating or breaking-up of a monopoly position).

  12. See Lin [31]. Lin mistakenly wrote ‘Asian Tigers’ (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines) instead of ‘Asian Dragons’, including Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

  13. This calculation is made by the author, based mainly on the World Bank Development Indicators and the data provided by the website IndexMundi (http://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/countries).

  14. According to the estimate of the Barclays Group, the overall debt balance of the Chinese government would reach 62–97 % in the end of 2012 [8]. The debt balance of local governments of Jiangsu province was 12.4 times of the local budgetary revenue in 2009 [19]. This is a level of debt that local governments are unable to repay on their own base. According to an audit report of National Audit Office [37], the ratio of the amount of the new borrowings for repayment of the old debt to the amount of total old debt of municipal governments of 5 out of the 15 audited provincial capital cities is more than 20 % in the end of 2012.

  15. See Singapore United Morning Post [59]. The importance of an ordered democracy is also stressed in his 2009 book titled ‘Democracy is a Good Thing’ [58].

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    Michael X. Y. Feng

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Feng, M.X.Y. The ‘Chinese Dream’ Deconstructed: Values and Institutions. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 20, 163–183 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-015-9344-4

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