Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount economic reformer, famously told the Chinese people: Never mind if a policy action carries the socialist or capitalist “surname”; if it works, it works and should be taken as such. “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” The Chinese people have taken his advice to heart.
The Scientific Outlook on Development, proposed by then-president Hu Jintao, was written into the Party Constitution at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The Scientific Outlook on Development implies that development must be grounded on the laws of nature and the laws that govern human behavior. Deng advised that China should tread its development path carefully, like wading across a river: groping with our feet for a safe path gingerly. There is no fast-food way; and there is also little point in relying on ideology or authority. In a word, the Communist Party of China is a pragmatic party, not beholden to dogmas or ideology, but a community of practical individuals committed to serving the country and its people.
Not long ago in this column, I referred to the election slogan used by the US’ previous president, “Make America Great Again.” I wrote it with no derogative intentions at all. I really hope that America will become a universally regarded “great nation”, and I honestly believe America has the capability to achieve greatness. The two stumbling blocks that have prevented America from becoming a great nation are arrogance and ideological hang-ups.
The world has seen the China miracle. China has achieved a transformation in less than half a century that has shaken the world. How has China made it? It is because when the Chinese leaders identify a goal, they work diligently to achieve that goal, leveraging on the market when the market helps, and leveraging on policy intervention and institutional reform when the market fails. The Chinese leaders are humble and not arrogant. Policy proposals are always carefully examined, and often tested on a small scale first before full implementation. Consultations are typically made with contributions from various think tanks as well as other political parties that share the same vision as that of the CPC.
To be great, America must be united: not to fight nor to contain China’s rise, but to play fair and be on the right side of history, and to pursue peace and common prosperity alongside China and other nations with unity of purpose. That is the only way to sustainable development. That is how China achieved what it did
The CPC is not beholden to any ideology when it comes to legal reform or economic reform. The Property Law of the People’s Republic of China went into effect on Oct 1, 2007, and protects private property. The Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China was adopted at the fourth meeting of the Standing Committee of the Sixth National People’s Congress on March 12, 1984. By 2020 it had been amended four times. The China National Intellectual Property Administration reported that China’s social satisfaction with intellectual property rights protection reached a record high of 80.61 points in 2021, up 16.92 points from 2012, when the survey was launched, exceeding the 80-point threshold for two consecutive years.
When the CPC realized that China must deal with environmental degradation, it acted decisively. An article published in Nature Communications, an authoritative scientific journal, concluded that China’s stringent clean-air actions on its energy use and CO2 emissions from 2013-20, by phasing out and upgrading outdated, polluting and inefficient combustion facilities, have led to “a net accumulative reduction of 2.43 Gt CO2 from 2013-2020, exceeding the accumulated CO2 emission increase in China (2.03 Gt CO2) during the same period.” Another article from another nature journal, NPJ Clean Water, discovered using data collected from 2003 to 2018 on 10 major river basins, analyzing with stacking machine-learning models, that there would be marked and long-term water-quality improvement from 1980 to 2050.
The CPC is China’s ruling Party, and it has built up China’s infrastructure to a level that appears futuristic: constructing a huge high-speed railway network, and a reliable power supply across the country that brought electricity to the remotest county; eradicating extreme poverty; devising a social security system that now covers almost the entire population; growing its manufacturing prowess and reputation as the factory of the world. All these years, China has risen peacefully, never claiming more territory than what was claimed before 1949, when the Party came to power. China welcomes any country to trade with it. What is the “China threat” all about?
My reading is that the perception of a “China threat” comes from the country’s strong competitiveness and efficiency. Competitors are scared. But China’s competitiveness came about because the country has worked hard, tackling each problem seriously and taking every identified goal to heart. This would not be possible without humility and learning from mistakes and freeing itself from ideological strictures. Will America dump its ideological strictures and start looking at the CPC just as a community of practical individuals committed to serving the country and its people? Just because the Party is called the Community Party does not mean it is there to start a revolution to overturn the existing world order. To be great, America must be united: not to fight nor to contain China’s rise, but to play fair and be on the right side of history, and to pursue peace and common prosperity alongside China and other nations with unity of purpose. That is the only way to sustainable development. That is how China achieved what it did.
The author is director of the Pan Sutong Shanghai-Hong Kong Economic Policy Research Institute, Lingnan University.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
