Regular readers may remember that a year or so back I suffered with a dose of Sino-situs ("Oh, very witty, Wilde!") in which I did my best to get to grips with events in China. After a while I gave up because it slowly dawned on me that nobody knew what was going on and we would only find out after the event or events.
Even so, it is worth recording that, as my trusty agents at NightWatch report:
The third plenary session of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party convened on 8 November. In its report announcing the opening of the four-day meeting in Beijing, state news agency Xinhua said it would discuss
"major issues concerning comprehensively deepening reforms".
Well, I don't suppose they're going to sit around discussing whether Man United will beat the Arsenal this weekend even if it is true, as we are told, that several zillion Chinese talk of little else these days! Even so, my reading of that quotation indicates that the reporter hasn't a clue! My trusty NightWatchers attempt to cast alight on proceedings with this:
Comment: Senior Chinese officials have hinted that this meeting will discuss and decide significant social and economic reforms, such as more liberal market conditions and more measures to reduce official corruption. In the past two weeks, authorities also have made clear that political reform is not on the agenda.
In other words, they haven't a clue, either! However, something big is going on, or at least, trying to go on, as the new leadership, realising that the truly 'Great Leap Forward' that took place after Mao's death has now run its course. State-controlled capitalism is an oxymoron. It will take you some way down the road to prosperity particularly if you started from the wasteland of state Marxism, but sooner or later you will realize that the very essence of capitalism is that it is self-correcting. This self-correcting process can occur in a myriad of tiny changes barely noticed by the population or in a catastrophic boom/bust, but whichever way it occurs it is crucial that it does happen. The alternative is economic schlerosis! Absolute rule by politicians and their bureaucratic party lackeys, nearly all of whom have vested, not to say invested, interests will sooner or later strangle the golden goose.
If the current Chinese leadership think they can achieve real change by tinkering at the edges or simply producing windy rhetoric they are fooling themselves and sooner or later they will 'reap the whirlwind'! But moving from strict one-party dictatorship to democracy is the most dangerous high-wire trick in the circus. Can they do it? Do they really want to try to do it? I don't know, do you?