IN AN officially atheist country, one form of worship actively encouraged by the Chinese government has been devotion to GDP. From village chiefs to national leaders, presiding over fast economic growth has been the surest path to career success. Targets for GDP have formed the centrepiece of annual budgets, with officials convinced that failure to achieve them would lead to soaring unemployment and even chaos. Officials fiddle the numbers—massaging them up when growth is too slow and down when it is too fast—but basic faith in GDP as the most powerful expression of their aims and accomplishments has been unwavering.
So the break with tradition was something akin to Vatican II, when on January 25th the Shanghai government announced its policy plans for 2015 and chose to omit a GDP target. While Yang Xiong, the mayor, pledged that the city would “maintain steady growth”, he gave no indication of what that might mean in numbers. In recent years China’s 31 provinces and mega-cities have steadily lowered their GDP targets as the economy has slowed. At least two-thirds missed their goals last year, a sign that such targets have become less important than in the past. But Shanghai is the first to dispense with a target altogether. The city’s Communist Party chief, Han Zheng, is a member of the ruling Politburo, so the omission was a powerful...Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment