In his article at Clarin Marcelo Cantelmi asserts that China is “betting on the free market”:
We have come a long way since the capitalist pilot scheme launched in Shenzhen in the 1970s by party leaders Deng Xiao Ping and Xi Zhongxun, father of the current President Xi Jinping. Shenzhen and its special economic zones provided the first free market model in China that has now come to encase the Communist polity in a liberalized economic, rather than political, environment.
The former Middle Empire is today a capitalist monarchy where decisions are taken at the top and whose changing leaders broadly follow the same, pragmatic policies. Thus we should not be surprised by the liberal tone of President Xi’s speech this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This was the first time a Chinese head of state was not just attending, but inaugurating this illustrious capitalist shindig.
I have some questions for Mr. Cantelmi.
- Please define “free market”.
- 90% of the company’s in China’s industrial sector are state-owned and all twelve of its largest companies are. How does that fit into China’s embrace of the “free market”?
My view of President Xi’s address at Davos was, as I’ve said before, far from being an embrace of the free market, his pitch for increasing China’s role in the International Monetary Fund, hardly a bastion of the free market.
If President Xi is betting on the free market, I think he’s betting on the rubes who espouse free markets getting to accept what China has as a free market.
