Last week, the Third Plenary session of the 18th Central Committee was held in Beijing to discuss reform measures to be introduced in China in the coming days. There were lots of speculations as well as inputs provided by Chinese academia before the meeting. The big hope was that there would be introduction of systemic reforms that will transform China’s economy and society.
President Xi Jinping is considered to be a reformer in many political and social circles. But since the plenary session, analysts now say that President Xi cannot be clearly identified as a reformer. To many the answer to this question is neither a clear ‘yes’ nor a ‘no.’ There is no doubt that the president is totally committed to convert China into a market economy. His idea is that the government should only concentrate in regulating and monitoring the economy. Further, he is strongly in favour of migrant workers and farmers enjoying all rights, as is now done by others in Chinese society. He is keen to see that they have equal rights and opportunities like others. He is also in favour of reforming the Chinese judicial system.
But one of the critical areas which should be in the reform agenda of the Chinese government is to break the monopoly of the major state owned enterprises. These firms are behemoths that dominate industrial production or extraction. Their appointed functionaries are not only politically powerful but also have high connections. Their performance is, however, much below what is desired. Not only are these units inefficient, they also lose government money as they depend on loans from government banks. So most of them are indebted to the state yet they still hold large portfolio of non-performing loans. Many enterprises have diversified their production and the managers spend much of the loans on luxury activities. It is here that massive reforms need to take place. But so far the president has not moved in this area.
President Xi Jinping is considered a leader with a liberal agenda. He was instrumental early this year in a nationwide drive to check corruption and clean up the bureaucracy as well as the Communist Party. However, the result was limited. Yet he continues his efforts. Significantly, he also called on the Communist Party, which has atheism as an article of faith and requirement for membership, to include and tolerate all religions which he terms as ‘traditional cultures.’ So, under President Xi there is a general drive to reform major aspects of Chinese society.
But some recent developments inside China point to the fact that the president is more of a pragmatist and realist than a reformer. There are now greater controls over the media in China. The social media, which includes the Chinese version of Facebook and Twitter, is tightly policed. Views, especially independent views, are regularly monitored. Several activists who espoused liberal causes have been jailed too.
In many ways, President Xi is sending out mixed signals. On the one hand he has lionised the Great Leader Mao Zedong. He has advocated ‘rectification’ of the Communist Party as well as promoted mass campaigns as Mao did, and which history tells us had once brought woe to the Chinese people. But at the same time he is closely following what his mentor, the diminutive Deng Xiao Ping who was belittled by Mao, had achieved for China. The president took his first tour after becoming president to the southern city of Shenzen to see for himself how Deng changed China and how he could take lessons from there for his own mission to revolutionise change in his country.
Many observers have noted that President Xi is ‘goal oriented and not ideologically constrained.’ In order to work assiduously in that path he believes that the Communist Party of China needs to be strengthened. This he thinks will help him to promote the wellbeing of the people. The whole Chinese nation will be revitalized, as he quietly pointed out when he laid before the world his ‘Chinese dream.’ To President Xi it is the Communist Party that must be in full control to achieve his aims.
So where is China headed? Is it treading the traditional path of Mao Zedong, or is President Xi emulating Deng Xao Ping to pull China out of the past and put it on the path to modernity and prosperity? It is of course time which will tell. The president has ten years to do what he wants to do with China, but we cannot forget that China is the second largest economy of the world. Whatever reforms take place in that country will definitely impact other countries in the region as well as round the world. Bangladesh, as a close neighbour of China, has deep interest in what is happening there. Ours is a market economy and we are interested to leverage the economic growth there for our own growth. As things stand we need to observe what is taking place in China for our own good.

The writer is a former ambassador and a commentator on current issues.
E-mail: [email protected]