Chapter 79 From the Tieben Case to the Four Trillion Plan: The Sixth "National Advancement and Private Retreat"

Any system is like an embryo, once it is formed, it will grow inertially and has the ability of self-realization. Without a good check and balance mechanism, its final form will even exceed the original intention and expectation of the designer. After the 1990s, China is falling into such institutional inertia. The centralization of power lacking checks and balances from local governments and civil forces has increasingly had a negative impact on economic development. It is particularly unique in that it competes with free capital and suppresses the latter. Yes, it is an unconscious process.

In October 2002, the Communist Party of China held the "16th National Congress". The report of the meeting described the future growth model of China's economy, and proposed to change the economic growth model and follow the path of "high technological content, good economic benefits, low resource consumption, and less environmental pollution." , a new industrialization path that gives full play to the advantages of human resources."It can be seen that under the scene of strong domestic demand and foreign trade, high-efficiency intensive transformation is inevitable for market competition.

However, ten years later, this new road to industrialization did not appear because of: First, the continuous urbanization movement makes heavy-duty investment with high energy consumption still have huge profit space; Second, the state-owned enterprises in the upper reaches of the industry enjoy their monopoly and have no enthusiasm for increasing investment in science and technology at all, while private capital in the middle and lower reaches of the industry is trapped by industrial and financial controls and cannot exert its enthusiasm. The scene of private capital being squeezed out began to appear at the end of 2003.At that time, in the face of the investment boom in the energy field, the State Council issued the "Notice on Several Regulations on Stopping Blind Investment in Steel, Electrolytic Aluminum, Cement and Other Industries", and organized investment from the Audit Office, the Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Land and Resources, and the Ministry of Construction. Personnel from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Commerce, the People's Bank of China and other departments formed 8 inspection teams and went to various places for investigation.The focus of the inventory is those private enterprises that have entered the three major industries and "blindly invested".Among them, the Tieben Iron and Steel Company in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province was dealt with in a high-profile manner. Premier Wen Jiabao personally flew to Suzhou to supervise the battle. Nine ministries and commissions formed a special inspection team and rushed to Changzhou to conduct a comprehensive inspection of Tieben Iron and Steel Company. , Defrauding bank credit, violating loan review regulations, and a large number of tax evasion and tax evasion", which were characterized as "a typical major case of serious dereliction of duty and violation of regulations by local governments and relevant departments, and enterprises suspected of crimes." Dai Guofang, chairman of Tieben, was arrested arrested and imprisoned.

Taking this as a watershed, many private enterprises' investment projects in steel, electrolytic aluminum and cement industries have been stranded.However, when private capital was strictly ordered to stop, state-owned capital made great strides forward.Take the iron and steel industry with the most serious "investment overheating" as an example. In 2004, when the iron and steel industry was severely dealt with, there were only two iron and steel factories in the country with a steel output exceeding 10 million tons. Except for Shagang, all of them are large state-owned enterprises.In March 2006, after two years in custody, Dai Guofang was tried for the crime of "falsely issuing tax deductible invoices". None of the "false crimes" identified by the nine ministries and commissions was charged.

The fiasco of private capital in 2004 was impressive.Huang Mengfu, then chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, once used the "glass door" to describe the embarrassing situation faced by private enterprises. He described: "Although there are no public restrictions on the access policies of some industries and fields, the actual entry conditions are quite restrictive. , mainly because of setting too high a threshold for entry qualifications. People call this phenomenon of "opening in name but restricting in reality" a "glass door".At a symposium, Lu Guanqiu of Zhejiang Wanxiang Group asked Wen Jiabao face-to-face whether the handling of Tieben meant a change in national policy.

The disappointment of private entrepreneurs once made decision-makers quite nervous. In February 2005, the State Council issued "Several Opinions on Encouraging, Supporting and Guiding the Development of Non-public Sectors such as Individual and Private Sectors". A central government document with the theme of the development of the public sector of the economy, which includes a number of measures such as relaxing market access, increasing fiscal and taxation financial support, and improving government supervision. Because the document contains 36 articles, this document is usually referred to as "non-public 36 articles" ", this document was once regarded as a major policy benefit for the private economy, but, judging from future implementation, almost none of it has been implemented.

In fact, after the macro-control in 2004, the industrial boundaries between state-owned capital and private capital have been demarcated: the former has achieved a monopoly position in the field of resources and energy, while the latter has been compressed in the middle and lower reaches of the industry. , as has repeatedly appeared in history, the Chu River and the Han border are clearly separated.Due to the formation of monopoly, the benefits of state-owned enterprise clusters have fully recovered. In the three years since the establishment of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, the main business income of enterprises directly under the central government increased by 78.8%, with an average annual increase of 21.4%; profits increased by 140%, with an average annual increase 33.8%; the tax paid increased by 96.5%, with an average annual increase of 25.2%; the value preservation and appreciation rate of state-owned assets reached 144.4%. In 2006, Feng Lun, a private entrepreneur and chairman of Vantone Group, wrote an article describing the disappointment and sad way of survival of private enterprises: "Private capital has always been a subsidiary or supplement to state-owned capital, so the best way to protect itself It is either to stay away from the monopoly field of state-owned capital, to settle down in a corner, to do small business, to actively do good deeds, to build roads and bridges; or to cooperate or form a joint venture with state-owned capital to form a mixed economic pattern. While maintaining and increasing the value of capital, private capital will be recognized by mainstream social values ​​and a relatively safe development environment will be created.... In the face of state-owned capital, private capital must always insist on cooperation rather than competition, supplementation rather than substitution, and subsidiary rather than overriding Only by taking a strong stand can we advance and retreat freely and continue to develop.” This passage is sad and pessimistic, and it can quite echo Rong Desheng’s letter to the government in 1945.

In the autumn of 2008, the global financial crisis broke out, and China's foreign trade industry declined severely. Since then, the decade-long golden period has ended, and the domestic economy has also shown signs of recession and depression. The central government decisively launched a "four trillion economic stimulus" at the end of the year Plan", comprehensively increased the construction of infrastructure such as railways, highways, and urban rail transit, making China's economy the first to "bottom out in a V-shaped rebound" half a year later. During this investment boom, state-owned enterprises received more than 90% of the credit payments Private enterprises once again become "bystanders" and downstream contractors.

In May 2010, the State Council once again issued a document to encourage the development of the private economy, entitled "Several Opinions on Encouraging and Guiding the Healthy Development of Private Investment", which encourages and guides private capital to enter basic industries and infrastructure, municipal public utilities and Policy-based housing construction, social undertakings, services and other fields were referred to as the "36 Non-public New Articles".However, this time private capital has been far less active in such declarations than it was five years ago.

In the ten years since the establishment of SASAC, state-owned capital groups have become the main force of the national economy again.According to data from the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, as of the end of 2012, the number of private enterprises in the country was 10.8572 million, with a registered capital of 31.1 trillion yuan and an operating income of 20.1 trillion yuan. The number of central enterprises belonging to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission is There are 120 companies with total assets of 31.2 trillion yuan and operating income of 22.5 trillion yuan. The "central team" showed a strong strength of "one against one hundred thousand".In terms of profitability, the performance of central enterprises is even more dazzling. The annual profit of the five state-owned banks alone exceeds 1 trillion yuan, which is equivalent to twice the sum of the net profits of the top 500 private enterprises in the country.Compared with state-owned enterprises, private enterprises only have an absolute advantage in employment: they solve 90% of the employed population.

While the state-owned capital group is unprecedentedly strong, the private capital group is weakening, and a large amount of funds are withdrawn from the real economy, either for luxury consumption, or for speculative profit, and there is a wave of immigration among the wealthy class.According to the "China International Migration Report (2012)" released by the China and Globalization Research Center, 27% of ultra-high-net-worth business owners with personal assets exceeding 100 million yuan have immigrated, and 47% are considering emigrating. Safe, inconvenient, and unhappy.” In addition, the “2013 China Multi-millionaire Brand Tendency Report” released by the Hurun Research Institute shows that only 25% of entrepreneurs in the current economy are “very confident”, up from 56% three years ago. %.In a country that has maintained the world's largest economic growth for four consecutive years, more than 70% of business owners lack confidence in the economic prospects and want to leave. This is a fact that is incomprehensible and requires vigilance. In the history of China's century-old modernization, the transition from the Iron Ben case to the "Four Trillion Plan" can be regarded as the sixth "National Advancement and Private Retreat" after the nationalization of enemy industries in 1945 and the public-private joint venture movement in 1956. A round of "decentralization and centralization" is a historic turnaround. Different from the previous five times of "National Advancement and Private Retreat", in this round of capital games, the decision-makers showed a dramatic mentality of extreme contradictions and divisions. During the two large-scale advances of state-owned capital, the central government also Important documents to encourage the development of the private economy have been promulgated twice.From this, we have recently observed the classic dilemma of China's economic governance: the state-owned economy is recognized as the economic and political guarantee of centralization and political stability, while the private economy is responsible for improving production efficiency and creating jobs. The competitive relationship among them has never been reasonably allocated, which eventually leads to unreasonable allocation of resources and wealth distribution, which leads to deformed economic growth.The decision-makers are not unaware of this conflict, but are trapped in technical difficulties.In the Government Work Report of the National People's Congress in March 2012, Premier Wen Jiabao proposed "two unwavering" reforms, namely unswervingly consolidating and developing the public sector of the economy and unswervingly encouraging, supporting and guiding the non-public sector of the economy .So, which of these two "unwavering" is more important? Once the former "shakes" the latter, or the latter "shakes" the former, how should we deal with it?