Chapter 83 The three most special battlefields: state-owned economy, land and financial industry

In the eyes of many people, the three most incredible parts of the Chinese economy are the huge state-owned economic system, land nationalization, and the government's comprehensive suppression of the private financial industry.These three are the main battlefields of future economic reforms, and there is already a consensus in the political and economic circles. However, there are serious differences in the choice of strategies. In 2012, some domestic economists who were angered by the delay in reform put forward a series of radical liberalization proposals, including the immediate implementation of land privatization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, the abolition of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and the abolition of the Development and Reform Commission, etc. Some people even suggested that state-owned assets should be allocated to every citizen on the basis of one share per person.These "looks beautiful" propositions have aroused extremely enthusiastic echoes among the people.However, if we return to the fundamentals of history to observe, perhaps the problem is much more complicated.In the economic reforms of the past dynasties, these three difficulties are the core propositions, which are related to the prosperity and decline of the country. They are like the "birthmarks" that have followed the birth of the centralized system of power, and they cannot be eliminated once and for all.

First of all, in the reform of the state-owned economy, just as many people equate the centralization system with dictatorship, the state-owned economy has also been marked with ideology. Many people believe that China will become a complete market economy country. The state-owned economy must be withdrawn from the stage of history.However, it is worth exploring whether such a deduction of inevitability holds true.China is the "hometown of state-owned enterprises". Since Guan Zhong's reform, the government has started to monopolize important resources. By the late Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there were endless doubts about the state-owned policy. At the Salt and Iron Conference in 81 BC, Sang Hongyang expressed his opinion The questions raised by Confucian scholars have not been answered until today.Therefore, none of the successive governments had the courage to eliminate the state-owned economic system. After 1998, the process of state-owned enterprises realizing huge profits through resource monopoly is actually a familiar "historic return".Before finding a better national governance model, for China, where "unification" is the most important cultural and governance goal, the complete disintegration of the state-owned economy is inconceivable.In Yang Xiaokai’s view, “Privatization involves major changes in property rights, which will generally reduce efficiency in the short term, so we should be cautious and seize the opportunity. However, liberalization can be carried out earlier. The liberalization mentioned here does not refer to free prices. , but to implement an automatic registration system, allowing private operators to operate all industries."

Therefore, the theme of future reform of state-owned enterprises cannot be "how to eliminate", but how to manage and share their benefits. The task of reform can be broken down into three aspects: First, "separation of government, party, and enterprise" changes the existing dual direct management model of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and the party's organization department. layer! Second, "enterprises for all people share with all people", inject most of the capital of state-owned enterprises into the social security fund pool, and make it a welfare of the whole society in the form of transfer payment;

Third, change the rights and interests distribution model of more than 100 central enterprises. Local governments participate in the distribution of benefits through tax retention and profit sharing, and at the same time invest this part of the income in the construction and maintenance of social security and public facilities. Secondly, in terms of land reform, most dynasties have implemented land privatization policies since Shang Yang’s reform, and today’s land nationalization is indeed facing a major legal and policy review.Land reform faces several unavoidable practical problems: First, for the government, land is not only the source of income with the greatest benefits and the lowest cost, but also a policy resource for implementing urbanization. If the right to operate is lost, the operating logic of the national economy will be redesigned;

Second, in the macro-control, the land has become a "big pool" for digesting excess currency liquidity. It is much more reliable than a money printing machine, and the RMB crisis that may erupt in the future needs to be respite and relieved from the land; Third, land has become a "transformer" for the redistribution of private wealth. If it is not handled properly, it will intensify the contradiction between the rich and the poor, and a huge class of destitute people will appear, leading to more serious social unrest. Therefore, the theme of land reform cannot be "immediate privatization", but a task divided into several levels:

First, under the premise of full publicity and substantial tax cuts for enterprises, implement property tax policies so that local governments can continue to benefit from land without relying on one-off auction sales; Second, establish a "land bank" at the central and provincial levels, inject all future land transfer income into it, conduct asset management, and use the proceeds for the construction of the social security system; Third, take agricultural mountain and forest land as a breakthrough point, carry out experiments in land ownership reform in small steps and sequentially.

Finally, in terms of financial reform, the government’s nationalization of the financial industry was an invention of the Kuomintang. Since the reform of the legal currency in 1935, state-owned capital has fully "taken over" the banking industry. The Kuomintang still maintains this policy in Taiwan. Until 1987 Before and after the lifting of party bans and reporting bans in 2010, the proportion of public capital in Taiwan's banking industry was still as high as 79.9%.Therefore, the opening of the financial industry is the most critical battle for market liberalization.Since 1993, private financial activities in China have been suppressed, and state-owned banks have been able to use policy measures to obtain astonishing profits no matter in the period of economic growth or depression. It is evident in the case. "Thousands of openness, ten thousand openness, it is better to let me run a bank" has become a very loud voice. Since 2012, the central government has selected places such as Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and Qianhai in Shenzhen to carry out financial innovation pilot projects, trying to make breakthroughs in areas such as offshore center construction, RMB internationalization, and interest rate marketization. These reforms still reflect the decentralization of central government and local domination , The characteristics of Chinese-style reform of civil participation.As the barriers of financial control are broken down one after another, the return of private banks in China's economic arena should be expected.

Through the exploration of the reform paths of the three special battlefields, we can see that although the reform of China's economic system is very difficult, and there are almost no "standard answers" to the difficulties and doubts in economics, however, for more than 30 years The wealth left by the reform is also very large, and the expansion space is full of imagination.In the next 15 to 20 years, the export capacity of the manufacturing industry, the dividends of urbanization, the blowout of domestic consumption, and the national expectation of becoming the world's largest economy will open up a big "time window" for reform.