Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis

@michaelxpettis

5 Tweets 23 reads Aug 05, 2023
1/5
For those who think that China's rapid development in the 1990s and 2000s was driven mainly by the unleashing of the private sector, and not by active government intervention, here is what Wu Jinglian has to say in this piece on Ryutaro Komiya:
caixinglobal.com
2/5
"Selective industrial policy became the centerpiece of China’s state economic policy regime and the main means of government intervention in the micro-economy under the so-called 'combination of planning and market' system."
3/5
"This practice carried on until the end of the 20th century. As a result, to this day, how to promote the transformation of industrial policy remains one of the more pressing issues that China’s economy needs to address."
4/5
The key issue for China, he says, is how to emerge from the state development policies that have been in place for decades. I agree. I'd say China's problems today are based on policies implemented decades ago and which started to become obsolete in the late 2000s.
5/5
The fact that these problems only became obvious to many analysts in the past few years has led them to assume that they must be the consequence of very recent "anti-market" policies, but that is not how economies evolve.

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