Hope you weren’t hoping for good news from President Xi Jinping’s speech Tuesday to an audience of party officials, military honchos, and business leaders on the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up campaign that unleashed China’s economy.
First, Xi did not offer any new ideas or plans to boost China’s faltering economic growth or to support its sputtering financial markets or to fix the bad debt problem at China’s banks. This would have been the perfect occasion for announcing stimulus plans, but Xi took a pass on that opportunity.
Second, Xi devoted much of his speech to a repetition of his vision of a China assuming its rightful place at the top of the global order. He reinforced his view that the Communist Party must be in charge of China’s economy as the country continues that global march. And finally, in words that seemed a calculated rebuff to U.S. efforts to induce China to change policies that subsidize key industries and that force overseas companies to turn over intellectual property in exchange for access to China’s markets, he said “no one is in the position to dictate to the Chinese people what should and should not be done.”
On Wednesday attendees will begin their annual economic planning meeting. We’ll see if anything less belligerent and more promising for the domestic economy emerges from those talks.
