JOIN USThe decisions of the third plenum of the Chinese communist party’s central committee, which has concluded in Beijing, mark a new emphasis on some key elements in China’s economic, social and security policies.
They amount to a radical shift in strategy to speed up growth, contain its unwelcome side-effects and to give the new leadership better control over the process. The plenum is considered as the most important event after the historic 1978 plenum which put Deng Xiaoping at the helm and launched the economic reforms which pushed China to the forefront of the world. The new leader Xi Jinping has termed it as momentous as it was meant to chart a new road map for China in the coming decade. The outlines of the map are more or less clear.
The most important decisions of the plenum are to give the market a more decisive role in driving economic growth and to improve the property rights system in order to give farmers land ownership. The details of both decisions will be known only in the coming months but both have the potential to hasten China’s transformation. They will take it further away from the Maoist model of development. The state’s role in the economy is likely to diminish further and state-owned enterprises may be reformed and made more dynamic with private participation. The land rights reforms will undo the Maoist order more thoroughly. The system of collective ownership of rural land is likely to come to an end and farmers may be able to individually own land and trade it. This may help to check the discontent in rural areas because of slower growth and take the dynamism of market forces to the vast hinterland.
China’s scorching pace of growth has slackened in the last two years. Unviable resource depletion, environmental pollution, social unrest and high corruption were all features or consequences of its model of high and fast growth. It now wants to start a new phase and to have better control over it. The new leadership has now assumed more powers than the previous one in the implementation of policies. Its confidence can also be seen in the more hawkish stance on political, foreign policy and security issues. Xi Jinping is emerging as a more assertive leader early in his career than his predecessors.