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China promotes a bourgeois line

Dean of INSEAD Gabriel Hawawini, left, and Timothy Feige, president and CEO of the Gibraltar Life Insurance, share a pair of headphones during their panel session on the last day of the Fortune Global Forum in Beijing yesterday. PHOTO: REUTERS

In an increasinging integrated world, fears of a clash of civilizations abound, but at the Fortune Global Forum such concerns have proven unfounded as China's communist leaders meet and greet the world's top capitalists.

During the opening session, which gathered 700 of the world's top business leaders, President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) vowed to create a better investment and trade environment while urging the entrepreneurs to make more money.

"All of you are important corporate leaders participating and promoting international economic activities, [you] have been vigorously involved for years in pushing economic and technological cooperation with China," Hu said. "Facts have proven that such cooperation serves our mutual interest."

Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan (曾培炎) was equally effusive, underscoring that with a growing population and environmental pressures, China is in dire need of foreign investment and business activity to provide jobs for its 1.3 billion people.

"I hope that every entrepreneur will expand investment and trade in China and Asia, push forward economic cooperation and realize a mutual win-win situation," he said.

Since China embarked on robust economic reforms 25 years ago the debate between communism and capitalism has largely been moot in the economic sphere, while the ruling party has maintained its Leninist grip on political power, said Kenneth Lieberthal, political scientist at University of Michigan.

"The Chinese Communist Party is no longer a communist party as we know it to be; it is a Chinese bureaucratic capitalist party where the officials have enormous incentives to make the economy grow, attract foreign investment and increase industrial production," Lieberthal said.

"This is basically a pragmatic authoritarian system focused on maintaining economic growth for another 20 years without having a social meltdown," he said.

If such growth can be realized, then it could bring enormous benefits to living standards and pave the way for long hoped for democratic reforms, he said.

"But with this system there has been increasing negative phenomenon, including corruption, local protectionism and things like the violation of intellectual property rights," Lieberthal said.

"In terms of communism and capitalism, these views today miss the point at both ends," he said.

Now both the communist and the capitalists are enriching themselves, while the nation is fundamentally better off.

Meanwhile, with some 500,000 foreign funded enterprises and over US$662 billion in foreign direct investment in China, few of the chief executives at the forum were eager to discuss China's political situation in an obvious effort not to offend their hosts.

"The CEOs that come here are focused on trade and economics and normally will not comment on politics; that is for the politicians," said Scott Kronick, president of Ogilvy Public Relations in Beijing.

"Economics and trade are the catalysts towards greater integration of the world. It is not right to have expectations for the CEOs to discuss politics; they are concerned about trade facilitation," he said.
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