Author: Hu Yun Source: East Asia Economic Review Date: February 2006-16.

Pages of East Asian Economic Review Articles: [1]

"This is a good era, this is a bad era."

I don't know when, the concept of social hierarchy such as "scholar, agriculture, industry and commerce" has been deeply rooted in the traditional thoughts of China people. For thousands of years, from politicians to scholars, while evaluating "business", almost all of them are derogatory. They hold a negative attitude towards the driving force of merchant economy, and various unfair laws and regulations emerge one after another in the system. They misinterpreted Sima Qian's Biography of Huo Zhi as a symbol of mercenary, and dismissed it as "all businessmen are unscrupulous", or it should be said that before the reform and opening up, China, from politicians to the general public, was disdainful and disgusted with businessmen. Of course, today's China people's attitude towards businessmen has almost changed 180 degrees, all of which happened after the reform and opening up. In order to build a socialist market economy, the state and local governments have introduced various preferential policies, including land policies and tax incentives, and made great efforts to attract investment, which has achieved remarkable results: in 2005, China's GDP increased by 9.9% over the previous year, reaching18232170 billion yuan, equivalent to $2,225.7 billion, and the per capita GDP/kloc. In the 26 years since 1979, China has actually utilized more than 600 billion US dollars of foreign capital. On the other hand, the gap between the rich and the poor in China continues to widen. A development report issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in June 5438+February 65438+August 2005 stated that the widening gap between the rich and the poor in China may threaten its social stability. The agency suggested that the China government increase social expenditure, reform the financial system and promote government reform to narrow the gap. Khalid Malik, representative of the United Nations Development Programme in China, pointed out in his opening speech: "At present, China's Gini coefficient has exceeded 0.4, even reached 0.45, which is usually considered as a threshold indicator of a country's potential social unrest." According to the data of the United Nations Development Programme, the degree of income distribution in China is much higher than that in the United States, which openly flaunts capitalism. According to the data of the 2002 household survey in China cited in the report, although the number of people classified as absolute poverty has greatly decreased, the richest population in China accounts for 4 1% of the wealth. The opinion polls quoted in the report of the United Nations Development Programme show that in China, a nominally socialist country, many citizens are dissatisfied with the increasing inequality. The report was completed by China scholars and supported by the Development Research Center of the State Council, China. On the other hand, as the fourth largest economy in the world, China's own brand declined in the prosperity of the country. China market is full of foreign brand products, from Dell and Hewlett-Packard computers to Coca-Cola soft drinks, from Boeing and Airbus aircraft to Nike shoes, from Sony and Samsung TVs to Philips razors. Foreign brands have conquered all areas of China, and China's own brands have been marginalized to an extremely dangerous situation.

"Don't be poor, be wronged."

China, who advocates Marxist socialism, and his government have been committed to improving the poverty situation in China. From the abject poverty in the early days of liberation to the well-off level of socialism now, it embodies the painstaking efforts of several generations in China. In 1970s, the reform and opening-up under the guidance of "Let some people get rich first" was launched vigorously in China. China, an ancient country that was the center of the world economy centuries ago, has once again opened its arms to the whole world. Although its face is slightly vicissitudes, after all, a good start makes the descendants of the dragon believe that a bright future lies ahead. Skyscrapers, wide and busy highways, foreign trade ports open 24 hours a day, the second largest automobile market in the world, and its GDP surpassed that of Britain in 2005-inadvertently realizing the first half of Chairman Mao's era of "catching up with the beauty of the Premier League". However, China's Gini coefficient has reached 0.45, the uneven income distribution is much higher than that of the United States, the number one capitalist country, and the social security has been deteriorating. Let's put down our achievements and spend more time analyzing the causes of inequality between the rich and the poor! There is an old saying in China that "you don't suffer from widowhood, but you suffer from inequality". At present, cases caused by hatred of the rich occur from time to time in China, and the phenomenon of hatred of the rich caused by the widening gap between the rich and the poor is getting worse. In fact, people hate the rich, not because there is a big gap between the rich and the poor, but because society cannot provide a level playing field. The "visible hand"-the unfair "starting line gap" caused by government power has become the "source of all evil". How are these "starting line gaps" caused? 1. Regional inequality. Just because of the difference in birth, some people automatically have valuable urban household registration, so it is relatively easy to get better primary education and enter better universities. Maybe most of them are not really rich, but for those who lack innate advantages, this is a kind of trench. In 2003, for example, Beijing's per capita GDP was 3260 1 yuan, the provincial capital city was 22565 yuan, the regional city was 13660 yuan, and the county level was 5674 yuan. In other words, Beijing's per capita GDP is 5.02 times that of county level, 3.98 times that of provincial capital and 2.4/kloc-0 times that of regional cities. A person's birthplace will directly affect his wealth. It is worth noting that the per capita GDP of a place is highly related to its position in the pyramid-shaped administrative power structure, that is to say, the principle of "giving priority to efficiency and giving consideration to fairness" that we thought in the past should be changed to "power" as the principle of resource allocation during the reform and opening up. 2. The abuse of power produces the rich class. Corruption is a combination of public power and personal desire: the supervision and management system and mechanism are not perfect, the anti-corruption institutions and judicial institutions are not unified, and the quality of personnel is not high, which makes it difficult to effectively investigate and deal with corruption. Chen Zhiwu, a professor at Yale University, said: On the one hand, the power of the government is not restricted by supervision; On the other hand, we let the government directly allocate resources instead of the market through the state-owned system, which is equivalent to giving all the resources of the people of the whole country to those in power who will not be held accountable. These centrally controlled resources and development opportunities are of course given to those regions and individuals who have power and connections. In this way, a considerable part of the huge wealth of the rich in China is not accumulated by accumulation. Some rich people started from scratch, neither relying on labor accumulation nor experiencing capital accumulation. Their income is neither labor remuneration nor legal exploitation income, but they use various non-economic means to occupy or steal other people's labor achievements through abnormal redistribution.

The embarrassment of "only increasing profits without increasing wages"

Why is there such a big gap between the rich and the poor in China? Why do China's independent brands end up in such an embarrassing situation? Maybe the answer to this question is complicated. Compared with other factors, the government's policy factor is undoubtedly the most decisive among many factors. Next, we try to analyze the process of forming the status quo of independent brands from the perspective of government policies. "The high wage standard is afraid of affecting the investment environment and scaring away the investors who have finally attracted!" Wu Ruilin, vice governor of Jiangsu Province, asked local leaders when inspecting the investment environment at the grassroots level, why didn't business owners give their employees a raise? I don't know what is the reaction of Vice Governor Wu? Government officials who call themselves "serving the people" and "public servants of the people" are so dismissive of the interests of the people because of their worship of GDP! The most important thing is that they try their best to increase the total GDP, so as to increase the so-called "political achievements", and the political achievements of this "GDP worship" are not always unified with the interests of the country and the people. For example, local governments are eager to introduce foreign capital. It is understandable that the government should increase the intensity of introducing foreign capital in the primary stage of socialism and build a "socialist" industrial system. The problem is that officials often sacrifice the interests of the broad masses of the people in the actual operation of attracting investment. For example, the phenomenon of "only increasing profits without increasing wages" mentioned above is a common phenomenon in the whole country. The reason why this phenomenon exists for a long time is, in the final analysis, the problem of leading cadres' view of political achievements. At the "China International Symposium on Economic Development", Li Jiange, deputy director of the State Council Development Research Center, once said, "We really need to care about low-income people, but we should also consider the affordability of enterprises. If wages are raised too high, investors will move their industries to Vietnam where wages are lower. Under this circumstance, our migrant workers don't even have the opportunity to work. " Some local leading cadres even regard low-cost labor as an advantage and use it as a bargaining chip for attracting investment. In order to attract capital enterprises to give the green light, Xu Chongnuo has too many things to do. Of course, labor cost is an important factor for enterprises to consider when investing, but it is by no means the first. If labor cost is the decisive factor, foreign companies can move directly to poor and isolated areas, such as Myanmar, where labor is definitely cheap, but foreign companies don't. The investment environment that truly powerful enterprises value is the government service function, market maturity and various supporting capabilities. In fact, this is an important factor that restricts the long-term development of enterprises. We have heard too much about how difficult and costly it is for enterprises to deal with the government. It is not a problem that the labor cost is high in a certain place, but the knowledge is sufficient, the technical level is high and the production efficiency is high. Some leading cadres do not strive to improve the quality of workers for the sake of so-called economic development and their own political achievements, but seek so-called development at the expense of workers' interests, which is actually contrary to our original intention of developing the economy. Isn't the goal of development to bring greater benefits to the people?

Reflections on foreign direct investment

In the 26 years since 1979, a large amount of FDI has flooded into China through preferential investment policies, the product of government power. According to statistics, China has actually utilized more than 600 billion US dollars of foreign capital, and FDI has become an important driving force for China's economic development. However, due to over-reliance on foreign capital and foreign technology, the flat homogeneous expansion of China's manufacturing industry and the trade friction caused by a large number of exports have gradually emerged, and more and more scholars have begun to reflect on the foreign direct investment strategy. At present, there are two main views on FDI, one is "inhibition theory" and the other is "promotion theory". "China's current economic dependence on foreign countries is unprecedented in history. Never in history has a big country been so dependent on foreign economy. It is necessary to change the current growth model that relies entirely on foreign investment and foreign technology. " Lu Feng, a professor at Peking University School of Government Administration, who was commissioned by the Ministry of Science and Technology to make a report on "Policy Options for Developing China's Automobile Industry with Independent Intellectual Property Rights", said. "China's automobile enterprises have fallen into a strange circle of backwardness-introduction-backwardness-reintroduction." Lu Feng believes that the strategy of "market for technology" put forward by 1992, that is, introducing technology through joint ventures, has failed most thoroughly in the automobile industry. "Although China's automobile industry has miraculously developed at a high speed, cars produced by China's automobile industry are mainly assembled with foreign brands." What did Professor Lu Feng see when he visited FAW Hongqi production workshop? "Mazda's mazda 6 is being assembled on the production line of Hongqi." Wang Hongling, a supporter of FDI's "promotion theory"-a researcher at the China in Tsinghua University and the World Economic Research Center, believes that the competitive pressure brought by the influx of a large number of FDI will definitely be unfavorable to some domestic enterprises. As long as they can compete with FDI in the same market, just as a chess player with low skills can continue to play chess with experts, their relative chess skills will certainly improve and they may eventually beat experts. Therefore, competition is the basic way to realize independent innovation of national enterprises. Such a conclusion needs a premise: to compete in a unified market. At present, the China government's policy of "worshipping foreign things and obsessing foreign countries" to attract foreign investment-"half selling and half sending land, zero fees, three exemptions from two taxes and preferential water and electricity" makes domestic enterprises not on the same starting line with foreign-funded enterprises from the beginning, let alone private enterprises that are restricted by various policies and have no government support. Coupled with various objective factors, these "sardines" of domestic enterprises are destined to be the belly of foreign-funded enterprises. In order to exert the positive effects of FDI: "catfish effect" and "technology spillover", the government's policy orientation can not be ignored. Huang Yasheng, a professor at Harvard Business School, believes that the policy meaning of FDI should no longer be limited to whether it is restricted or not. Focus on whether the spillover effect of foreign capital can still occur when private enterprises are still restricted by fiscal policy, financial policy and industrial policy. A study by Harvard University shows that only when a country has a relatively efficient financial system can foreign capital easily show spillover effects. "For a simple example, if I work in a foreign-funded enterprise and learn a lot of technology, then I want to go out and start my own business. If I can't get the loan, the spillover effect of foreign capital will not be seen at this time. Both Taiwan Province Province and South Korea have a set of financial and legal systems to support such start-ups. Therefore, in this financial system, it is easier to see the benign promotion of foreign capital to domestic capital. On the contrary, if our financial system is very unreasonable, especially when there are many restrictions on private enterprises, the spillover effect of foreign capital is not particularly obvious. " In this case, Huang Yasheng said that our policy conclusion should not be to restrict foreign investment, but to be more open to domestic investment. At present, China's two most important industrial policies-automobile industry policy and steel industry policy-support large enterprises controlled by the state and jointly invested with foreign capital, while private enterprises with independent research and development capabilities are the one who opposes exclusion. For example, Geely Automobile Group, a well-known domestic private brand automobile manufacturer, took three years to get the "birth certificate" from the relevant state departments. The inflow of foreign direct investment into China this year decreased by 0.5% compared with last year. I hope this will be a turning point and change China's economy which depends on foreign direct investment. China's economic reform has reached a critical point, which has passed. It may not be a dream to move from "Made in China" to "Created in China". The key lies in how the government's policy changes from "worshipping foreign things and obsessing foreign things" to serving the private enterprises created by China, thus changing the embarrassing situation of "enriching the country and enriching the people" and benefiting the people.