Politics can be as detached from underlying economic realities and needs in Beijing as it is in Washington."Once each side starts talking details and the political lines harden, it becomes tough to see how any serious legislating can get done over the next two years," it reports. The government is clearly insulating itself against internal critics who are ready to sabotage reform efforts, calling them "Americanization" by another name. Even the prospect of reforms appears to have revived old-school ideological battles, and official commentary has repeatedly warned against "Westernization" and reverted to Maoist rhetoric on toeing the political line. Political interests and ideology matter greatly in China, as much as, if not more than, in the U.S. In 1992, he deftly maneuvered to re-establish it: Twenty years later, ChinaÕs economy is transformed. As capable as Deng was, even he almost lost the consensus on economic liberalization in the late 1980s. The Chinese patriarch Deng Xiaoping, for example, fully understood the importance of managing the politics of economic reform, especially in 1976, after the country awoke from a nightmarish decade of political upheaval. Economic reforms may end up so riddled with compromises that they please none and disappoint all. Without a generally unified long- term consensus, it will be quite difficult to repair the ship of state. But execution will require the Chinese leadership to sustain political conditions that allow these reforms to take place with relatively few obstructions. The question about Chinese reforms isn’t so much "what" as "how" - it’s an execution problem, not a blueprint issue. Officials in Beijing are also in the middle of a heated debate over an ambitious economic reform agenda, elements of which will be unveiled at a major Communist Party meeting in early November. won’t last long, as the politics of reform are set to command the attention of the Chinese government, too. Huge differences exist over whether the state ought to be shepherding reforms in the first place.Ĭhina’s schadenfreude over the political dysfunction in the U.S. Already, structural changes are being contested on ideological grounds. Undertaking the appropriate structural reforms will require a rearrangement of political interests, as all such reforms do. is confronting several pressing challenges: how to reduce inequality, slow the erosion of the middle class, create 21st-century jobs and sustain competitiveness. As it continues to recover from the global economic crisis, the U.S. The showdown in Congress was merely one symptom of a much more complex and intense political debate over the shape of America’s economic future. still faces a structural deficit and a growth problem, which will require significant changes to its economy in order to be resolved. The two governments share a much more significant problem: how to align their political systems to enable the vital structural economic changes their countries desperately need.Ī bargain over the debt ceiling was always likely to be the eventual outcome, despite the eleventh-hour scare. Yet these are superficial and fleeting contrasts. a feature of the last debt-ceiling crisis, too. sovereign debt by China’s Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. It is notable that some of these commentaries only appeared in the English-language press, both within China and globally: They were clearly aimed at a Western audience. They gleefully piled on with op-ed articles arguing for "de-Americanizing" the world and rapidly reducing China’s purchase of U.S. At the same time, and unsurprisingly, surrogates in the Chinese news media and commentators in the intelligentsia were less restrained. Publicly, Chinese leaders remained statesmanlike and above the fray, withholding comments on the circus in Washington. The purported icon of democracy watched its system descend into chaos and petty political gamesmanship, coming within hours of a default that would have sparked global economic disorder. By most accounts, the past few weeks have exposed a drastic maturity gap between the U.S.
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