Chapter 26 The best period in the history of the first quarter

"I am honored to be in the same era as you!" These were the first words of the two nuclear physicists when they met during World War II.I want to say this to all contemporary Chinese today, because we are both in the best period in Chinese history. With a sense of 5,000 years of historical vicissitudes, I asserted in 2001: "Now is the best period in Chinese history, because China has never combined reform, opening up, and stability at the same time like today." It is recognized by many people at home and abroad. Why come to this conclusion?China's 5,000-year history, let's make rough statistics: How long is China's stable period?The Spring and Autumn and Warring States lasted 800 years, and there were countless wars, big and small. Sima Qian recorded in "Historical Records": "In the Spring and Autumn Period, thirty-six kings were killed, and fifty-two countries were destroyed. So, let alone ordinary people?The split between the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties also lasted 369 years.Each dynasty was relatively stable when it was established, and then there was a financial crisis, unable to cope with internal and external troubles, and the life expectancy was 200 to 300 years.Roughly speaking, the real stable period of Chinese history is about 1000 years, which is 1/5 of the entire history.

Okay, let's make an estimate of how long the reform period will be?China has always had a tradition of reform. "Although Zhou is an old state, its life is restored."However, the period of economic reform is too short in the 5000-year history.In 422 B.C., Wei Wenhou (reigned from 424 to 387 B.C.) appointed Li Kui as chancellor and carried out reforms, one of which was the implementation of the famous "Purchasing Method", which used market economic means to stabilize the large fluctuations in grain prices and ensure a good harvest. At that time, the government bought grain at a fair price, and then sold it at a fair price in a disaster year, so as to avoid hurting farmers due to low grain prices.In 361 BC, the State of Qin implemented the "Shang Yang Reform". Although it was successful, the people in China at that time were in the chaotic period of the Warring States Period and could not be implemented throughout the country.In AD 8, Wang Mang’s New Deal, in order to solve financial difficulties and stop the tax reduction caused by land mergers, Wang Mang implemented the “Wang Tian System” following the “Zhou Li” and restored the “Well Field System” under the name of “Wang Tian System”, but the economy did not work. Several currency reforms were carried out, and small coins of the same value were exchanged for big coins, which triggered a frenzy of private minting among the people, and was defeated by the economic law of "bad money drives out good money".In order to crack down on the piracy, Wang Mang imposed heavy penalties. Ban Gu's "Hanshu" recorded that "thieves who steal coins cannot be banned, but the law is important. One family casts money, five families sit on it, and they are confiscated as slaves."As a result, "Civilian criminals made money, and five people sat together, and they were confiscated as official slaves. The men sill the car, the sons and the women walk, with iron locks as their necks, and the number of bell officials is 100,000. Those who arrive change their husbands and wives." , the sorrowful dead are even sixty-seven".The piracy was prevented, but the credit of the new currency was not established, and the circulation of the popular "five baht coins" at that time was prohibited. As a result, the economy of the new dynasty lost the standard currency as a basic circulation tool, and the economy collapsed rapidly.According to the "Book of Han", "At that time, the common people would Anhan five baht coins. It is difficult to know the size of the reckless money, and if you don't believe it, you will buy it in the market with five baht coins. If you say big money, don't worry about it." Willing to coerce. Reckless to worry about. Re-write the letter: "Those who hold five baht of money and say that big money should be given up are not compared to the well-field system, and vote for four descendants." So farmers and businessmen were unemployed, food and goods were all abandoned, and the people wept in the city. road".A locust plague triggered a large-scale peasant uprising.In 23 AD, the peasant uprising army invaded Chang'an, Wang Mang was killed, and the "Wang Mang New Deal" failed.Wang Anshi's reform in the Northern Song Dynasty had not been tested, and a series of problems appeared in the actual implementation.In the first year of Yuanyou (1086 A.D.), Sima Guang became prime minister and abolished the new law.At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Juzheng was brave enough to take charge of his affairs, and looked up to his demeanor at home and abroad. The "one-whip method" in the economy was an attempt to monetize taxation. The country's income increased greatly. In addition, the "examination method" improved the efficiency of the government's operation. "History of the Ming Dynasty" stated "Taicang millet can be supported for ten years, and the accumulated funds of Jiong Temple have reached more than four million." Within 10 years, the Ming Dynasty was revived.But Emperor Wanli abolished most of the reforms after Zhang Juzheng's death, gradually spending the fiscal surplus.Since then, Houjin has risen outside the pass, but he was caught off guard.

These five economic reforms all took place during the period of closedness, about 100 years, accounting for about 1/50 of China's entire history.Then let's count the opening period.During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the period of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, the period of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the period of Kublai Khan and the period of Ming Chengzu, it was considered open. After Zheng He's seventh voyage to the West in 1433, it began to be closed for 400 years.The period of opening up is counted as 500 years, accounting for about 1/5 of Chinese history.Looking back, most of our history is that there was no opening up during the reform period, no reform during the opening up period, and there were periods of reform and opening up but instability.The chances of reform, opening up and stability happening at the same time are more than one in a thousand.The "Zhenguan Reign" of the Tang Dynasty (627-649 A.D.), which was fully prosperous in all aspects, brought about a peaceful and prosperous age of political clarity, economic development, social stability, opening up to the outside world, and cultural prosperity. Unfortunately, it only lasted for 23 years.Therefore, purely based on probability statistics, the current situation in China is a once-in-a-thousand-year event with a small probability, and the opportunity for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a once-in-a-thousand-year wait.

There are profound economic rationales behind the three basic conditions of reform, openness and stability that must be met simultaneously.Without stability, there will be no investment confidence. Economic recession, tax base reduction, increased expenditure, and national financial difficulties will inevitably reduce public expenditures, and education funds will first be reduced. This is why the per capita education years before the founding of the People's Republic of China was less than 1 year , basically an illiterate country.At the same time, without stability, China's economy will fall into the predicament of low savings rate.People think that Chinese people love to save by nature, and it is natural for the savings rate to be above 30%. It may be due to the influence of traditional culture, respect the elderly, love children, and save some money at home for emergencies.I used to think so too, but it's not. In 2001, I saw in the Marshall Library of the Economics Department of Cambridge University that Professor Fairbank estimated that the saving rate in modern China was only about 10%!I was shocked at the time and felt that stability was so important.The decrease in education investment and low savings rate are not only the policy mistakes of successive Chinese governments in modern times, but also the inevitable economic consequences of national instability.

If there is no openness, there will be no way to participate in international trade and capital flows, and it will be unprepared for the productivity revolution breaking out in the world. As a result, it will fall into the trap of "high-level dynamic equilibrium" within a certain general technological paradigm, and economic development will stagnate for a long time. In 1433, the long-term maritime embargo after Zheng He's seventh voyage to the Western Seas made China completely ignorant of the industrial revolution in the island nation of Britain. In 1820, the British economy experienced explosive growth. The speed of wealth accumulation was unimaginable in the agricultural economy. In just 20 years, it had enough strength to conquer the world.Ignorance of the productivity revolution is a more fatal mistake than the "ostrich policy".During the period of the "Cultural Revolution", there was an opportunity to transfer the world's manufacturing industry. East Asian countries and regions were export-oriented, relied on low-cost labor, participated in the international manufacturing division, and created the "East Asian Miracle". However, China's foreign trade volume was pitifully small. Don't know where to cut into the international trading system. In 1971, the information revolution quietly broke out in the United States, but China was still basically closed to the outside world, without knowing it. On May 28, 1978, when Deng Xiaoping met with the special envoy of the President of Algeria, he said: "In the past, the 'Gang of Four' interfered with construction behind closed doors. They didn't even know what the world looked like. There is some gap in the development of China, but it is not very big, so the past ten years have made a big difference."

Reform of the economic system is also crucial.The impact of the productivity revolution is uncertain and unpredictable, and the supply curve shifts substantially to the right. This requires that the economic system not only have allocation efficiency, but also have adaptive efficiency, and must be able to adjust at any time to create effective supply.When the productivity revolution occurs, the profit model of enterprises is also unpredictable, and the life span of enterprises is getting shorter and shorter.Without reform, the economic system will gradually become rigid, the profit model will become outdated, and new growth opportunities will not be seized, and it will eventually stagnate.

In 1997, the Chinese embassy in the UK held a "Seminar in Celebration of Hong Kong's Return" at Cambridge University.At that time, foreign countries had a lot of worries about Hong Kong's future.I said that with a reformed, open and stable motherland, there must be a long-term prosperous and stable Hong Kong.Later, Xinhua News Agency mentioned my speech in the report.My logic is simple, that is, the mainland's economy will grow rapidly in the long term, doubling in seven years, and it will not be a problem to drive Hong Kong's economic growth, not to mention the active interaction and cooperation between the mainland and Hong Kong.In the 12 years since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, under the strong economic support of the motherland, Hong Kong's economy has experienced painful structural adjustments in the manufacturing industry, overcome the Asian financial turmoil in 1997, and will eventually successfully overcome the difficulties of the 2008 world financial crisis, surpassing the "East Asian Miracle" ", continue to perform "Legend of Xiangjiang".

Li Hongzhang lamented China's "unseen changes in three thousand years", which can be described as a deafening voice that surpassed his era. On November 7, 1901, when he died in Xianliang Temple in the suburbs of Beijing, he was in tears, and his eyes were never closed, "the eyes are still piercing."Only when you hear "something that is not yet done by the public, I will die, please don't worry, the public" will "close your eyes".It can be seen that he is extremely helpless and worried about China's situation.He did not expect that China ended the long-term turmoil in 1949, established a stable paper currency system for the first time, got out of the debt crisis, and achieved macroeconomic stability.Moreover, the Chinese government became the "primary driving force" of human capital, and finally made the Chinese economy out of the trap of "high-level dynamic equilibrium" for thousands of years. The birth rate dropped, and the necessary preparations before the economic take-off were completed. A change unseen in five thousand years."Gu Zhun, the earliest economist in China who advocated a market economy, told Wu Jinglian in the "cowshed" that it is expected that China's "shenwu boom" will definitely come, and we must be on time and wait for it.

On the night of December 2, 1974, when Gu Zhun was dying, he told Wu Jinglian to "open the camp bed and rest", full of love for this future master of Chinese economics.After Gu Zhun passed away, Wu Jinglian helped push him into the morgue.Wu Jinglian's daughter asked him later: "What does it feel like to be sad?" He replied: "I just felt very, very cold on the way home. I felt that it was a cold world. Gu Zhun was like a little bit of warmth." Brightness, but he left. But, I think, he still left us light..." Gu Zhun knew that China already had the conditions for economic take-off, and he was more confident than Li Hongzhang.Gu Zhun envisioned the "Shenwu boom" to come four years after his death, but Gu Zhun did not expect that the Chinese economy would experience multiple consecutive "Shenwu booms", with an average annual growth rate of 8.66% in 30 years.As shown in Figure 3-10, China's per capita income has soared from about US$300 in 1978 to more than US$3,000 in 2009, achieving economic changes unseen in the Chinese nation in 5,000 years.Numbers are silent, but they are also objective. The "blowout" per capita income growth is a great spectacle in the history of human economic development.

Kuznets, a Nobel laureate in economics, summed up six characteristics of modern economic growth: (1) high-speed growth of GDP per capita and population; (2) high-speed growth of productivity; (3) high-speed changes in economic structure; Rapid ideological change; (5) Economically developed countries tend to explore international markets and raw materials; (6) Limited economic growth spread to 1/3 of the world's population.China fully possesses these six characteristics. The greatest achievement of the second 30 years since the founding of New China is to create a leap in people's living standards from the initial subsistence to the level of middle-income countries.The average annual growth rate of per capita GDP exceeds 8%, and more than 200 million people have escaped the poverty line.This wealth creation activity is not a scale of tens of millions of people, nor a scale of hundreds of millions of people, but a scale of more than one billion people.As shown in Table 3-4, in 1987, the per capita GDP exceeded 800 US dollars, exceeding the task of quadrupling the per capita GNP from 1980; in 2001, the per capita GDP reached 1,000 US dollars, entering the stage of a moderately prosperous society; , GDP per capita is 2010 US dollars.According to the World Bank's standards, China has entered the threshold of a middle-income country; in 2009, China's per capita GDP will reach more than 3,000 US dollars, and it has truly become a low-end middle-income country.

With the rapid increase of per capita income, people's consumption demand has begun to upgrade, and life has become more and more fashionable.In terms of food composition, the consumption of grain has decreased, and the consumption of animal food such as aquatic products, meat, poultry, eggs, and milk has increased significantly.Per capita milk consumption increased from 1.2 kg/person in 1986 to 26.7 kg/person in 2007.Private cars appeared on a large scale.According to the statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics, in 1990, the number of private cars in China was 820,000. In 2008, the number of private cars in China increased by more than 20 million in a short period of ten years.In the United States, there are an average of 13 people per car. According to this standard, the total number of private cars in China will quadruple to 100 million. This is not impossible.In the past 30 years, medium-sized cities with a population of more than one million have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, international city circles have begun to surface, and Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have become super international metropolises.About half of the rural labor force has transferred to non-agricultural industries. There has never been such a large-scale population transfer in human history before. China got rid of the shortage economy inherent in the planned economy and entered an era of sufficient market supply.The Chinese, who have always been troubled by the scarcity of commodities, have quickly entered an era of relative surplus in just a dozen years.In the era of shortage economy, there were not enough eggs. Because the family urgently needed them, they squatted next to the chicken coop and waited for the chickens to lay eggs. This seems unthinkable today.Looking back at the era when we bought fat meat instead of lean meat in order to refine edible oil from fat meat, it really makes people born before 1980 feel like a lifetime away.For the generation born in the 1990s, food stamps are already "antiques" and can be used as "art" investment. Indeed, in terms of "high-speed social and ideological transformation", China is changing too fast.The growth rate of the world economy since the Second World War has been between 2% and 4%. Taking an average, it is about 3%. The per capita income of world residents has doubled in 24 years.Since China's reform and opening up, the average growth rate has been about 8%, that is, it has doubled in nine years.Speed ​​is time and life experience.Chinese people have experienced twice as many socio-economic changes as people in the world have experienced in the same period of time.The life expectancy of Chinese citizens is about 74 years old, which is equivalent to "living" for 200 years in the rapidly changing Chinese society.Mao Zedong's youthful heroism of "being confident in living for two hundred years, will be able to hit the water for three thousand miles" has become the reality of "counting the romantic people and looking at the present".Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs lamented in 1992, "I finally understood what a 9% economic growth rate meant—an economy that never stopped, working round the clock to make up for lost Time. For China, the time to make up is 550 years.”Why is it 550 years?Because there is a book published in the United States, it is believed that Zheng He discovered the American continent in 1442, from 1442 to 1992, exactly 550 years. China is moving rapidly into the future, and today's experiences will become "tomorrow's yellow flowers" tomorrow. In 2007, Stephen Green, a senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank, believed in a report that "everyone is living with changes, but the speed of change of others cannot keep up with the speed of change of the Chinese people at the moment. Imagine that your family is in their 20s. Your kids are making unimaginable salaries, and the speed with which they change jobs leaves you dumbfounded. Bulldozers tear down the house you grew up in, and skyscrapers rise from the rubble. Some of your neighbors take out-of-the-ordinary travels .Welcome to China, a country that is renewing itself every year."Stephen Green said: "Of course, we counted the Chinese New Year as a bit of a joke. But we hope to express in numbers the dizzying speed of change that people feel after entering China." According to Green's calculations , one American year is equal to 1/4 Chinese year, and one British year is equal to 1/3 Chinese year.In other words, life changes twice as fast in China than in the US and UK. There is also an ancient Chinese proverb that "Three years old is the youngest, and seven years old is the old", which shows that the social and economic environment at the age of seven has a profound impact on future life.The world and traditional China are 10 years for a generation.But in today's China, 10 years is the gap between two generations. On the high-speed train of China's economy, the traces and characteristics of "intergenerational" are also unprecedentedly obvious.Every generation of Chinese people has the sense of loneliness of "the past does not see the ancients, and the future does not see the new", and also the sense of heroism of "there are talented people from generation to generation, each leading the way for hundreds of years". On the era train in China today, we will also have motion sickness reactions.I use the words of the master of economics Keynes to describe the life of contemporary Chinese people, "We are living in an era of rapid change and unsatisfactory. Most people, especially those who stand at the forefront of the times, They find themselves alien and incongruous with their surroundings: they are inferior to their predecessors in innocence and simplicity, and inferior to their descendants in sophistication. They are therefore far less happy than either.”For example, people born in the 1970s have better living conditions than those of the 1960s, especially the "Chinese Baby Boomer" generation, but they are not as rich as the 1980s.Therefore, people in the 1970s are not as calm and simple as those in the 1960s; they are not as relaxed as the modern people in the 1980s.Today's China is "old and young", and all Chinese people today are "rejuvenated".Compared with our predecessors, our experience is richer than theirs. In this sense, our "actual age" is "older" than our predecessors. From the perspective of world history, in the past 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the "Great Leap Forward" of per capita income from 100 US dollars to 3,000 US dollars has been completed, and the process of human economic development that can only be completed in hundreds of years has been compressed into the decades of life of contemporary Chinese people. finished.Therefore, the "actual age" of contemporary Chinese people is also "older" than people in many countries.At the same time, today's Chinese are all "young".From the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, China's per capita income will continue to soar at a growth rate far higher than the world average, and it will enter a basically affluent society from a well-off society in an all-round way. The life experience in the next 40 years will be very rich.I often hear in the United States that there is no yesterday in the United States, only today and tomorrow.I want to say that China not only has today, but also has yesterday and tomorrow.With the glorious history of thousands of years of yesterday, China hurriedly enjoys today, leaving today behind and rushing towards a better tomorrow.Therefore, it is much more difficult to understand China than to understand the United States, because it is necessary to understand China's rich history of yesterday, its fleeting present and its imaginative tomorrow. I use the words of the far-sighted Tocqueville, who expressed the unique charm of French literature in beautiful words, to describe the historical significance of our time: "Although the revolutions in social conditions, legal systems, ideas and human feelings are far from The end, but its consequences are far beyond anything that has hitherto occurred in the world. I have looked back age after age, all the way back to antiquity, and have not found a change like the one I see now. " I borrowed from Liang Qichao's description of the era we live in: "The red sun is just rising, and its way is bright; the river flows out and flows into the ocean; the dragon dives into the abyss, and its scales and claws fly; Trying the wings, the wind and dust spread; the first birth of a strange flower is the emperor; the general grows up, and there is a light; the sky wears its green, and the earth wears its yellow; even though there are thousands of years, there are eight wastes, the future is like the sea, and the future will be long. Beautiful, I am young in China, and I am not as old as the sky! Brave, I am young in China, and my country has no borders!"

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