It was widely believed in the early 1950s that the socialist Chinese government was the saviour of the poor and the free market an evil to our society. However, when the government sent me to the Inner Mongolian countryside to be re-educated in the late 1960s, I realised that such ideological fervour masked the intrinsic flaws of our planned economy. That was the very beginning of my China story.
As a business leader, I experienced the reform of the past 30 years and learnt more about the problems we have to deal with in China. Today, the country is in the late stage of transition from a planned to a market economy – and disputes about the relationship between government and market are different from those in countries that have well-established market systems.
Even in an economy that has grown at 10 per cent annually in the past three decades, the debate remains: is this success due to government control or the effect of the free market? The answer to this critical question will define China’s future. Will it continue its unfinished free-market reforms or end our 30-year transition where we are now? Do China’s economic problems and social frictions result from market reforms themselves or from bottlenecks and backward steps in the reform process? Is China’s state-dominated economic model a transitional arrangement that has achieved its ends or an innovation that should be strengthened?