【英语财经】中国的政治风险远超经济风险 We should worry about China’s politics not the economics

The debate about China’s economy, amid all the noise and drama coming from the bursting of its stock market bubble, is essentially about whether its annual economic growth rate might really be 5 per cent rather than the official 7 per cent, or — shock, horror — could actually be as low as 4 per cent, which cannot qualify as a catastrophe. Or it might mean nothing much at all, given that the Chinese stock market is essentially a gambling den that is only weakly connected to the wider economy. So pardon me for failing to get very excited about it. The real reasons to be interested, and even worried, lie in politics, not economics.

Chinese events raise three big political questions. The first has more than a touch of Schadenfreude, admittedly.

For years, we have been told that one of China’s great advantages is that its authoritarian government is better able to make and implement decisions and steer economic change than our feeble, navel-gazing democracies. What we are watching is a test of whether there is any truth in this claim beyond simply the ability to sweep people out of the way when new high-speed railway lines or airports are to be built.

It is eight years since Wen Jiabao, then prime minister, made a much-noted and admired speech at the National People’s Congress saying that Chinese growth was “unstable, unbalanced, unco-ordinated and unsustainable”. Supposedly this, and associated initiatives to clean up the country’s environment, was to herald a new phase of reform, a new transition away from investment-intensive, dirty growth towards a cleaner, more high-tech and consumer-led variety.

Yet precious little has happened. Chinese air and water are dirtier than ever, and if anyone thought environmental controls had been tightened at all, the explosions of hazardous chemicals earlier this month in the centre of Tianjin, claiming more than 120 lives, should have disabused them. In the economy, investment has indeed been fading away as a motor for growth, which means that arithmetically consumption looks more important than it did. but this is just a statistical artefact: other sources of growth have not been emerging to take investment’s place.

Such transitions are difficult. But, as Chinese leaders know very well, the one that Mr Wen was calling for in 2007 is hardly unprecedented. Exactly the same sort of transition took place in Japan during the 1970s and in South Korea in the 1990s.

During such transitions, reforms need to be made that hurt some powerful interest groups and may cause a rise in unemployment, so political leaders need to mediate between such interests while maintaining public trust and social cohesion.

In Japan, this was handled by a democracy. In China, it is being handled by a Communist party that for the past two years has also been trying to tighten its political control of the country. So far, the verdict would have to be that an authoritarian regime is faring badly at achieving these economic reforms or, to put it another way, at reconciling its own often competing objectives.

The second big political question arises from this. If the stock market crash does have any real domestic consequence, it will come from the anger of retail investors at their losses. That may prove a minor factor, but add it to anger at man-made disasters such as that in Tianjin, and quite possibly at rising unemployment, and you have the potential for a considerable public backlash of the sort that Communist party leaders have always worried about.

So the issue will be one of how big such a backlash becomes, and how the party responds if it does become serious. As well as the power of state-owned enterprises and local governments to block change, one explanation of China’s failure to deal with Mr Wen’s “four Uns” has been the party’s hypersensitivity to public disorder and a desire to avoid it at all costs.

Now such disorder may be unavoidable. Which means it will have to be managed, in some way. And we all remember how it was managed in June 1989 in the streets around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and in other Chinese cities that were convulsed by protests about the economic crisis that was occurring at that time.

We can’t answer this question in advance. The same applies to the third big political question, which is about how economic stress might affect China’s behaviour towards its neighbours in east and Southeast Asia.

This may well be the biggest reason to worry. Asian countries that have done well out of trade with China in the past 20 years are already suffering from a decline in that trade. There may be other sources of financial and economic contagion to come, as there were during the east Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. But the worst contagion would be if in response to economic stress the Chinese government, or perhaps just the Chinese military, were to ratchet up nationalism and escalate the territorial disputes the country has with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines and others, in the East China Sea and South China Sea.

If that were to happen, it would make a stock market crash look like a lot of fuss about nothing.

The writer is a former editor of The Economist

在中国股市泡沫爆裂引发喧嚣和闹剧之际，有关中国经济的辩论本质上是在争论中国的经济增速：中国的年化经济增长率是不是并非官方公布的7%，而是5%，甚至（天哪！）只有4%（不过，这也算不上一场灾难）？或者，考虑到中国股市本质上就是个赌场，和整体经济基本面只有微弱联系，中国股市泡沫爆裂可能根本没有什么大不了的。因此，不好意思，这件事并没有让我十分激动。值得关心、甚至忧虑的真正理由，在于政治，而非经济。

中国的事态提出了三个重大的政治问题。无可否认，第一个问题幸灾乐祸的意味十足。

多年来，我们都被告知，比起我们虚弱无力、过于关注自身的民主政体，中国最大的优势之一，就是其威权政府更有能力制定和实施决策，引导经济变革。我们现在正在注视的正是对这种主张的检验，测试的是：除了能在要修建新高速铁路线或者机场的时候把挡道的人们赶走以外，这种主张是否还有任何真实成分。

8年前，时任中国总理的温家宝在中国全国人大会议上发表了一番备受注意和赞赏的讲话，称中国的发展“不稳定、不平衡、不协调、不可持续”。理论上，这番话，以及治理该国环境污染的相关举措，将预示着改革进入新阶段，启动从污染严重的投资密集型增长向更清洁、更高科技和消费拉动型增长的新转型。

然而，落到实处的少之又少。中国的空气和水都比以往任何时候更肮脏。如果有人认为环境控制有所收紧的话，本月早些时候造成120多人死亡的天津危险化学品爆炸事故应该已经纠正了他们的看法（截至8月31日，这次爆炸事故导致的死亡人数已升至158人——编者注）。经济方面，投资作为增长引擎的作用的确逐渐减弱，这意味着消费在算术上看起来比过去更重要。但这只是一个统计假象：能够取代投资位置的其他增长来源还没有出现。

这样的转型很困难。但是，如中国领导人所知，温家宝在2007年呼吁的那种转型并非没有先例。日本和韩国分别在上世纪70年代和90年代经历过完全相同的转型。

在此类转型中，必要的改革会伤害一些强大的利益集团，还可能引起失业率的上升，因此政治领袖需要协调这些利益，同时维持公众的信任和社会凝聚力。

在日本，把握这一过程操作的是一个民主政体。在中国，负责这一工作的是一个共产主义政党，这个政党过去20年来一直试图收紧对国家的政治控制。到目前为止，我们不得不得出的结论是，一个威权政权在实现这些经济改革方面，或者换句话说，在调和自身（通常相互竞争的）目标方面表现不佳。

这引出了第二个重大的政治问题。如果股市暴跌确实在中国国内引发了什么真正的后果的话，那一定是散户投资者对他们的损失的愤怒。这也许其实只是一个小因素，但再加上人们对天津爆炸事件等人祸的愤怒、以及失业率上升很可能引发的民愤，有可能形成民意的大规模反弹——而这正是中共领导人一直以来所担心的。

所以，问题将是这样的反弹会发展到何种规模，以及事态一旦变得严重中共会如何应对。除了国有企业及地方政府阻止改变的能力，中国未能解决温家宝所说的“四不”问题的一种解释是，中共对民众骚乱的极度敏感及其不惜一切代价避免骚乱发生的意愿。

如今，这种骚乱也许不可避免了。这意味着这种状况必须以某种形式得到控制。我们都记得1989年6月发生在北京天安门广场周围街头、以及其他城市街头的那场骚乱是如何得到控制的，当时，人们对经济危机的抗议活动席卷了那些城市。

我们无法预先回答这个问题。我们同样也无法预先回答第三个重大政治问题，即经济压力可能会如何影响中国对东亚和东南亚邻国采取的行动。

这很可能是最值得担忧的理由。过去20年得益于对华贸易、经济表现健康的亚洲国家，已经开始承受对华贸易下滑的痛苦。接下来或许还会有其他造成金融和经济领域不良影响的因素出现，正如1997-98东亚金融危机期间一样。但是最糟糕的一种不良影响是：为应对国内的经济压力，中国政府、又或许只是中国军队，会煽动民族主义，使中国与日本、越南、菲律宾等国在东中国海和南中国海上的领土争端升级。

如果未来发生这种情况，将使股市暴跌显得不值一提。

本文作者为《经济学人》(The Economist)前主编。

译者/何黎