DAVOS, Switzerland — A lot of people at the World Economic Forum are talking about the Beijing consensus. But there is no consensus about what the China’s economic growth model actually is.

Concern about that model somehow challenging Western democratic capitalism runs deep here at a time when China has become the No.2 economy, surpassing Japan and gaining on the United States. It faces none of the problems many rich countries are grappling with after the financial crisis: debt mountains, high unemployment and political gridlock.

But what actually characterizes the Chinese model? A Chinese economist here at Davos, who preferred to remain anonymous, tried to shed some light on the question, citing four key characteristics he said defined Beijing’s communist-capitalist-Confucian system.

Policy toolkit: The Chinese authorities have a much larger toolkit to interfere in the economy, he said. They can regulate and tax and hand out contracts like in the West. But they also can — and don’t hesitate to — meddle in financial markets if they feel a share price, for example, is not at the right level.

Corporate allegiance: Many companies are not only state-owned, but are accountable to the government as well. The government picks the management and managers report to the government. They are motivated less by pay than their Western counterparts, mainly because they are paid less: Even the boss of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s biggest bank by some measures, reportedly earns less than $200,000 a year.

Resources: Beijing controls unusually large resources. They not only have nearly $3 trillion in currency reserves and get a steady stream of profit from state-owned business but they also control all the land. “Fiscal problems do not exist in China,” the economist said. “If they authorities need money they can just sell some land.”

Long-term planning: The authorities in Beijing set long-term strategic priorities and then systematically pursue them in five-year-plans.

For democracies committed to the rule of law and the free — although perhaps more regulated — market, there is not a whole lot that can be adopted from this list. But several Western economists here are urging that at least more long-term strategic thinking be tried, even if Western electoral politics makes that difficult.

The man the Communist Party is busy grooming to be China’s next leader can be read in so many ways.

He is a communist “princeling,” the equivalent of royalty in the Party, born into power and privilege but who then lived in a cave.
He is a man who has spent his life in the Communist Party but who knows what it is like to be outcast.

He has convinced businessmen he is their champion, while overseeing a system where the state controls huge chunks of the economy.

He has shown himself to be irritated with foreign criticism of China but has sent his daughter to study at Harvard under a false name to hide her identity.

His wife, Peng Liyuan, a singer, has, for most of his career, been far more famous than he has.

Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

It seems that our fetishization of new technology has blinded us to blatant abuse of the workers of the world. This is a much needed reminder and a critical view of Foxconn.

Two short articles. One on China and Tibetan Buddhism, the other on China vs. the Vatican.

On May 23rd four people went to a police station in Beijing with a petition demanding justice. Victims of official wrongdoing often make such trips, and usually they are given short shrift. But this was no ordinary group of the downtrodden. The petition bore the names of nearly 10,000 people accusing a liberal intellectual of slandering Mao Zedong and attempting to overthrow the Communist Party itself. Emboldened by a chill political wind, diehard Maoists in China are rising to confront their critics.
The Maoists’ appeal for the arrest of Mao Yushi, a well-known economist (and no relation of the late chairman), is their most concerted public attempt in many years to put pressure on the government. A clutch of Maoist websites frequently vilify intellectuals such as Mr Mao. But campaigning openly for someone to be put on trial is unusual. It is a symptom of a recent escalation of ideological struggles between China’s West-leaning liberals and conservative hardliners.

In the past several days, China has been doing much soul-searching. More than 300 of the Communist Party’s most powerful leaders met in Beijing and discussed ways of boosting the nation’s “cultural soft power”: an admission that for all the country’s economic prowess it lacks the magnetic draw of a country like America. Ordinary Chinese, however, have been more preoccupied with a hit-and-run accident that caused the death of a two-year-old girl. A dearth of what one Chinese newspaper commentary called “moral soft power” has been widely blamed for her demise and the seeming cold-heartedness of passersby.

HAS China returned to the days of central planning? Or is it just stomping on anything that smacks of democracy? The Chinese government’s decision to suspend the airing of “Happy Girl”, a television talent show with hundreds of millions of fans, has whipped up a storm of questions far tougher than any that its dolled-up contestants had to face.

In less than a decade China could be the world’s largest economy. But its continued economic success is under threat from a resurgence of the state and resistance to further reform.
The Economist offers another special report on China. I’ve excerpted the most relevant articles.
 

THE pursuit of happiness, runs one of the most consequential sentences ever penned, is an unalienable right. That Jeffersonian sentiment seems to have influenced even China’s normally strait-laced, rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which has just wrapped up its annual session. Increasing happiness, officials now insist, is more important than increasing GDP. A new five-year plan adopted at the meeting has been hailed as a blueprint for a “happy China”.

IF THERE was one thing that the world’s tycoons agreed on at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, it was that the Chinese state is a paragon of efficiency—especially compared with the doltish, venal clowns in Washington and Brussels. “Beijing really gets things done,” sighed one American chief executive. “Their government people are so much smarter: it’s terrifying,” enthused one of the world’s richest men. The chalets resounded with stories of contracts rapidly signed, roads speedily built and young engineers designing brilliant cars and software programs.
There is indeed much to admire about parts of the Chinese government. Over the past 30 years the regime has overseen perhaps the biggest increase in economic well-being ever, with several hundred million people moving into the middle class (even if the state had previously been the main thing that held them back). China is led by a group of people who take government enormously seriously there are countless stronger forces pushing in the opposite direction.

For all this, there is something of a Potemkin village about the Chinese state. It is, after all, not terribly hard for a dictatorship to build roads and railways faster than a democracy can. Multinational companies and the educated middle classes are doing well from the state, but the poorer majority in this ever more unequal country get a raw deal. And even if some of its leaders are trying to move closer to Singapore’s model,.

SHANGHAI, China—”I’m here to find a lesbian, to be with me and to build a home,” No. 11 says to the crowd clustered on floor cushions at a sunlit yoga studio in Shanghai. No. 11 is a muscular man in a flannel shirt and cargo pants, and he easily commands the attention of the crowd of 40 or so young men and women who are gingerly sipping glasses of wine and whispering to their neighbors.

“In my view, a 30-year-old man should start thinking about having a family, but two men can’t hold each other’s hands in the street. We’re not allowed to be a family,” he says. The crowd nods.
I’m at a fake-marriage market, where Chinese lesbians and gay men meet to find a potential husband or wife. In China, the pressure to form a heterosexual marriage is so acute that 80 percent of China’s gay population marries straight people, according to sexologist Li Yinhe, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. To avoid such unions, six months ago, Shanghai’s biggest gay Web site, inlemon.cn, started to hold marriage markets once a month.

Read on from Slate

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of “When China Rules the World,” he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country.

Read on

Richard McGregor, former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times tries to dispel 5 myths about the CCP in this piece for Foreign Policy magazine.

Your assignment is to read this piece and summarize each myth in a couple sentences. Then, again in a couple sentences, discuss how McGregor’s arguments are consistent and inconsistent with what you know about China.

Here’s a little piece on the curious role of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao