Chapter 78 "The Rise of Great Powers" and Zhu's Logic

Zhu Rongji's two wonderful performances in 1994 and 1998 made him the world's most eye-catching politician and economic governance master in the last few years of the 20th century.In 2001, he led China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) through difficult negotiations.Under his governance, China has created an economic miracle with no outbreak of inflation for 12 consecutive years and an average annual GDP growth rate of 9%. -0.6%, -1.3%, 0.8% and 0.7%).This period can be called the "golden period" with the fastest economic development in the history of contemporary China. It has surpassed France, the United Kingdom and Germany, ranking third in the world.

The Chinese economy has undergone dramatic and major changes in terms of industrial structure, state-owned economic profit model, manufacturing structure, local fiscal revenue model, and national wealth distribution. The first is the strategic transformation of the industrial structure from light to heavy. With the investment in road transportation and the heating up of the real estate market, China has since entered a new era of urbanization construction. Due to the shortage of various raw materials and energy, the prices have been soaring all the way, especially the prices of cement and steel have reached the point of "three prices in January". This in turn stimulated large-scale investment in upstream industries. In 2002, the total investment in the national iron and steel industry was 71 billion yuan, an increase of 45.9% over the previous year. In 2003, this figure reached 132.9 billion yuan, a 96% increase in investment.Similar to the steel industry, investment in electrolytic aluminum increased by 92.9%, and investment in cement increased by 121.9%.

Almost at the same time as the rapid heating up of investment in the energy industry, state-owned enterprise groups are strategically "retreating" to the upstream sector of the industry, so they have become the biggest beneficiaries of this wave of investment.By around 2003, the state-owned economy had taken on a completely new look.Zhu Rongji's last important plan before leaving office was the establishment of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which defined the 189 super-large state-owned enterprises with the strongest monopoly power and the largest assets as "central enterprises", with total assets of 7.13 trillion yuan. The owner's equity is 2.59 trillion yuan, which is basically concentrated in traditional monopoly industries such as oil, steel, finance, and communications. These "central teams" have become the "basic disk" of the state-owned economy.

In the middle and lower reaches of the industry, the clothing, food, machinery, and electronics manufacturing industries controlled by private enterprise groups have become the beneficiaries of the relaxation of foreign trade policies. Small and medium-sized enterprises in Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu provinces have moved to the international market, and their manufacturing capabilities have been improved. With a great release, "Made in China" has had a profound and irreversible impact on the global manufacturing industry. The "unbundling" of the real estate market has brought about three major effects.

First, local governments that have lost their tax sources in the reform of the tax-sharing system use land transfer as the main means of increasing revenue, and use the name of "urban management" to hype up land prices. In 2005, the national local fiscal revenue was 1.44 trillion yuan. In the same year, the land transfer fee income as the extra-budgetary income of the local government was as high as 550 billion yuan, about 1/3. By 2012, the land transfer fee income had reached 26,800 yuan 100 million yuan, accounting for 48.4% of local fiscal revenue, plus 1.8 trillion yuan of land-related tax revenue (a small part of which is shared with the central government), local governments have formed a serious dependence on land.Soaring land prices have become a persistent problem plaguing China's economy.

Second, real estate has replaced manufacturing as a new high-profit industry.By 2001, 60% of the top 100 richest people in the "Forbes" China Rich List came from the real estate industry, and this proportion has never declined in the following ten years. This of course makes entrepreneurs engaged in manufacturing Very frustrated.In the history of the United States, although there have been periods of skyrocketing real estate, but among the top 100 richest people in the United States, the proportion of real estate developers has never exceeded 5%. Third, with the continuous rise of housing prices in central cities and the large-scale issuance of currency, more and more urban residents buy real estate as a safe-haven investment for wealth appreciation and resistance to inflation. , House prices have soared, becoming a "transformer" for private wealth allocation.Farmers, urban low-income groups, and young people who have just entered the workplace have little income during this round of wealth boom, especially those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who have to "overdraw" their lives for the next 20 or even 30 years. house.

The above-mentioned evolutions have shown a very clear track, which constitutes the basic appearance of China in the 21st century. Up to now, all the economic characteristics have not escaped the "situation of change" laid out by Zhu Rongji.In this process, the structure of the four major interest groups has also changed dramatically. The post-1994 re-centralization was a set of carefully designed institutional reforms on state capacity building, whereby the central government regained economic dominance and kept it firmly in its hands through flexible monetary, credit, and industrial policies.

It is difficult for Zhu Rongji's economic thought to be defined by "planned economy" or "market economy" in general. In fact, he has been fiercely attacked by both conservatives and liberals. In December 1996, Zhu Rongji watched the drama "Shang Yang". When Shang Yang was crushed to death by a car during the performance, he was "moved by the plot and burst into tears".This is a very historical scene.To be more precise, Zhu Rongji is neither a conservative nor a liberal. He is indeed an economic statist dedicated to reshaping the authority of the central government. , the masters of totalitarianism with mixed reviews—from Shang Yang, Sang Hongyang, Liu Yan, Wang Anshi to Song Ziwen.Maybe many years later, people will still be arguing about how to evaluate Zhu Rongji.