Rejuvenation will benefit world

(China Daily) Updated: 2013-12-13 07:00

Editor's note: The International Dialogue on the Chinese Dream was held from Dec 7 to 8 in Shanghai. The following are excerpts of three speeches.

Chinese Dream and China's governance

Kenneth Lieberthal, senior fellow in foreign policy and global economy and development at the Brookings Institution

China's new leadership has sought to inspire the country with its call to realize the Chinese Dream, which is collective and responsive to deep historical sentiments in China.

China's leaders face an extraordinarily complicated set of obstacles in trying to achieve the goals that are central components of successfully pursuing the Chinese Dream. Most of these are well known, such as:

The most rapid demographic transition in peacetime history, and the first that will produce a country whose population is old before the country in per capita terms is rich;

Resource scarcity - especially the scarcity of usable water in the North China Plain, but extending on a per capita basis to most types of natural resources - that is of staggering dimensions;

A revolution in information technology that is producing rapid changes in society, whose repercussions for governance are inevitably uncertain but potentially very consequential.

The sheer magnitude of the social strains generated by simultaneous massive changes in terms of urbanization, marketization, globalization, growth of the non-State sector, and the information revolution. All are necessary for long-term success as a modern state and society, but each in the short run is a challenge to social stability.

The Party's Third Plenum resolution lays out a substantive conception of directions of change in Chinese policy between now and 2020 that are exceptionally wide-ranging and complicated. On balance, these changes seek to enhance the importance of market forces in determining the allocation and utilization of resources, the legal system in assuring basic rights and fair outcomes, bureaucratic reforms, and monetary and fiscal policy changes to shift incentives throughout the economy in order to create a more efficient, productive, fair, and sustainable set of economic and social outcomes. The implications for governance of these changes are very complicated and in many cases potentially contradictory.

The success of a more modern, well-educated, wealthy, internally and internationally connected Chinese population will depend on the wisdom, capabilities, and incorruptibility of Party cadres at all levels.

This is a major challenge. It will require huge changes to the current realities within the Party, the current distribution of power within the political system, and the current incentives and practices throughout the polity.

But the polity is already massive, with complex internal structures, norms, incentives, principles, and existing policies and regulations.

Navigating this terrain to produce the massive changes identified will require tremendous political skill and will inevitably generate many crises that will need to be managed and resolved.

And the market itself will produce unpredictable and at times very unwelcome outcomes that will also require skillful political adjustments to keep things moving in the desired direction.

It will require extraordinary skill to manage the politics of turning this broad Dream into operational programs that can successfully be implemented.

And the implications for future governance will be determined not only by the strategy for implementing the Dream but also by the forces that develop as China's economy and society are themselves transformed.