This article is the second part in a series on China as a global power.

Part One : Is China an Imperial Power in the Image of the West?

China’s experiment with socialism was chaotic and failed to produce the much-desired transition to development and prosperity.

When the country broke with socialism and cautiously ventured into market-led development in the countryside in the late 1970s, China was one of most equal societies on earth. It was also quite poor, with over 30 percent of the population living under the poverty line, much like the Philippines then.

Today, with its gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, at .50 or above, inequality in China matches that of the Philippines. However, the number of Chinese living in poverty are down to around 3 percent of the population, while over 20 percent of Filipinos are still poor. Inequality has increased, but in terms of lifting people out of poverty, China is regarded as an unqualified success story — probably the only one in the world.

An acquaintance with the key characteristics and vulnerabilities of China’s contemporary economy will enable us to get a sense of the dynamics and direction of China’s economic relationships with the Philippines and the rest of the Global South.

For instance, it is easy to mistake the vaunted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a grand plan for China’s global hegemony, as many have, if one does not take into consideration China’s massive industrial overcapacity problem, for which the BRI has been devised as a solution. And one cannot understand the overcapacity problem without referring, in turn, to one of the central features of China’s economy: the decentralization of economic decision-making, which has led to a great number of competing projects, much waste, and tremendous surplus capacity.

China’s economy is a capitalist economy, though one that is uniquely Chinese. It might be called “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” to give a more accurate spin to Deng Xiaoping’s puzzling description of his project as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Deng, Mao’s pragmatic successor as the dominant personality in Chinese politics, led China’s integration into the global capitalist economy in the 1980s and 1990s.

China’s contemporary political economy has four key features:

It is largely liberalized or market driven. It is largely privatized but with state intervention in areas considered strategic. Its cutting edge is export-oriented production sustained by “financial repression.” And it is decentralized, with a great deal of autonomy for local decision-making while central authorities focus on broad national-level macroeconomic strategies and policies.

Liberalization

Liberalization, or the removal of state controls on production, distribution, and consumption, took place in three stages over the 1980s and 1990s.

Market reform started with de-collectivization and restoration of a market-based peasant economy in the countryside in the early 1980s, followed by urban state-enterprise reform and price reform in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) accelerated, with the aim being the transformation of these enterprises into profit-oriented capitalist corporations.

Throughout these phases, the main thrust of the reform was, as Ho-Fung Hung, a leading authority on China’s economic transformation put it, “to decentralize the authority of economic planning and regulation and to open up the economy, first to Chinese diasporic capital [Overseas Chinese] in Asia and then to transnational capital from all over the world.”

Privatization with Strategic State Intervention

While market signals stemming from local consumer demand and global demand became the dominant determinant of resource allocation, the visible hand of the state did not disappear. It just became more discriminating. While departing from central planning, the Chinese state did not follow the so-called Northeast Asian developmental state model pioneered by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan that restricted foreign investment and favored domestic enterprises across the board.

In contrast, in China, non-strategic sectors of the economy were opened up to competition among private enterprises, local and foreign, while those areas considered strategic from the point of view of national security, national interest, and overall “national competitiveness” were subject to significant state regulation, with much production controlled by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that were, however, allowed a degree of competition with one another.

In other words, the government permitted large-scale foreign direct investment to allow local businesses to access and diffuse foreign technology across a whole range of industries, while maintaining exclusive control and focusing state resources on those industries considered vital for the comprehensive development of the economy.

Given the massive pullback of the state from large swathes of the economy, there is justification in describing China’s political economy as “neoliberal with Chinese characteristics,” as the Marxist economist David Harvey does. But perhaps, it is better characterized as a market economy with strategic islands of state-controlled production and with broad macroeconomic surveillance exercised by the central state.

This is a far cry from the centralized micromanagement of the economy of the pre-1978 socialist state.

Export-Oriented Production with Financial Repression

While the greater part of domestic production was directed at the local market, the strategic thrust of the Chinese economy post-liberalization was rapid industrialization via production for export, a feature captured in the saying that China became “the manufacturer of the world.”

Exports at their peak in the first decade of this century came to a whopping 35 percent of gross domestic product, a figure that was triple that of Japan. China became, as Hung puts it, the “hub for a global production network that begins with design studios in the United States and Europe; proceeds through producers of specialized components and raw materials in East and Southeast Asia; and ends up in China, where designs, materials, and components are brought together in finished products that are then sent all around the world.” (In this “Sino-centric” division of labor, the Philippines was integrated as a food producer, a source of raw materials, and a provider of industrial components like computer chips.)

Making export-oriented production the cutting edge of the economy meant restraining the growth of domestic consumption, a feature that was underlined by the policy of financial repression — that is, the interest rate on savings from consumers was deliberately kept low in order to keep the interest rate of loans to state-owned enterprises and private enterprises engaged in production for export low. From 2004 to 2013, the average real deposit rate was an extremely low 0.3 per cent.

A third key ingredient of export oriented manufacturing was a policy of keeping the value of the renminbi low relative to the dollar. From 1979 to 1994, the renminbi steadily depreciated against the dollar, from 1.5 to 8.7, as China moved away from its old Mao-era import substitution model towards an export-oriented model that required an undervalued renminbi to make China’s exports competitive on global markets. Then, in 1994, the renminbi was devalued 33 percent relative to the dollar, followed by a peg of 8.3 renminbi to the dollar over the next nine years, greatly boosting the competitiveness of Chinese goods in global markets.

In his trade war with China, U.S. President Donald Trump has called China a “currency manipulator,” allegedly deliberately keeping the value of the renminbi low to flood the U.S. with its exports. However, most economists say that China has let market forces largely determine the value of the renminbi since over a decade ago.

The fourth ingredient in the export-led model, its “indispensable fuel’” according to Hung, was the “protracted low-wage labor released from the countryside since the mid-1990s.” While there was a “demographic windfall” in the form of large rural surplus labor force that allowed China to take advantage of low-wage labor longer than other Asian economies, the latter was also a result of government policies that, in contrast to the 1980s, funneled resources from the rural areas to the urban areas and generated a continuous exodus of the rural population since the 1990s.

The combination of favorable financial policies for the export sector, an undervalued currency, and low wage labor was a formula that unleashed a flood of cheap Chinese goods on the world that proved to be deeply destabilizing not only for the industrial sectors of economies in the global North but also of those in the global South like Mexico and Brazil, which had higher wage levels.

In these areas, China was not only as a source of competing imports but a cause of deindustrialization, as some corporations uprooted their labor-intensive industrial facilities and moved them to Southeastern China and others simply subcontracted the making of their products to cheap-labor Chinese firms. Not surprisingly, working class resentment built up in places like the so-called “rust belt” of the U.S. that Trump was able to harvest in 2016 with his anti-China rhetoric in his drive to the presidency.

Decentralized Authoritarianism

Contrary to the popular image of China’s development being the product of centralized direction, a decentralized character has, in fact, been one of its key features.

Decentralization has been one of the key ingredients of China’s growth formula, dating to the 1990s. Decentralization was a spur to intense competition among localities since Beijing, according to one account, “started evaluating local officials by how quickly the economy grew under their watch” — and they, in turn, “competed with each other to woo firms, offering them cheap land, tax breaks, and low cost labor.”

Described as essentially like turning the bureaucracy into a “large start up business,” decentralization sought to decisively break the command economy as well as force local authorities to “own” the reform process both by giving them the responsibility for coming up with the resources for investment and allowing them to reap the rewards of successful capital accumulation.

Provincial and local authorities have thus had a great deal of power in interpreting and implementing general strategic directives from Beijing. The economic authority of the central government has been deliberately weakened, its role being transformed into that of an “indirect player“ focused on managing the macroeconomic backdrop such as interest rates, exchange rates, and preferential policy toward certain regions and sectors. Indeed, China has been described as the “most decentralized country on earth,” with the share of revenue of local government being more than twice that common in developed countries — and also much bigger than that typical of developing countries.

It is important to note, however, that strong local authority and command of resources in the capital accumulation and development process covered mainly the nonstrategic sectors of the economy. Important agents of central control across provinces were some key state owned enterprises (SOEs) in the designated strategic sectors, such as energy, heavy industries, railways, and telecommunications that were directly controlled by Beijing, though they themselves enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. Here it must be qualified, though, that the majority of the country’s 150,000 SOEs — and two thirds of all SOE assets — were controlled by provincial and local governments, not by Beijing.

The relationship between the local and the center has oscillated between decentralization and recentralization over the years, with the latest phase of recentralization, though limited, taking place under the current leadership of Xi Jinping.

In most other countries, the extent of decentralization would probably have led to a permanent weakening of the center. China, however, has an advantage over other countries that makes the system work and not fly apart — and that is the Communist Party structure that parallels the government structure at all levels and across all regions. While allowing factional conflicts to a significant degree, the party structure and its attendant discipline are what makes possible the paradox of “decentralized authoritarianism.”

Liberalization, privatization along with strategic intervention in key industries, export-led industrialization with currency management by the state, and decentralized authoritarianism — these were the ingredients of the so-called Chinese miracle. They were also responsible for generating the problems now faced by the economy, a topic to which we will turn in the next installment of this series.

This series is based on the recently published study by Focus on the Global South titled China: An Imperial Power in the Image of the West? on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China this year.