‘China will have to open up more’

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Jonathan Fenby feels China will face increasing questions about its global role, and its relations with other Asian nations

The tiger’s head of China’s growth faces the world, but the snake tails of problems closer to the ground are ever present,” writes Jonathan Fenby in Tiger Head, Snake Tails, analysing the gigantic imbalances that come in the way of Dragon Kingdom’s growth. China, world’s second largest economy with a population of more than 1.3 billion, continues to be a conundrum to many. Tiger Head, Snake Tails, which comes close on the heels of Julia Lovell’s The Opium War that dealt with drugs, dreams and the making of the country, provides fascinating insights into the “essence and evolution” of today’s China, peering into what the future holds for the “giant hotpot”.
A former editor of the Observer and South China Morning Post and currently head of the China team at the emerging markets research firm Trusted Sources, Fenby has earlier authored France On The Brink, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost, Dealing with the Dragon, The Sinking of the Lancastria, Alliance: The Inside Story Of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another.

Excerpts from an interview:
Q: What factors do you ascribe to China’s meteoric rise as a global power?
A: China had a winning combination of cheap labour cheap capital and external markets in developed nations which wanted to buy cheap Chinese goods — plus governments which saw China as non-threatening and a useful exporter of deflation.
Plus, the desire of the Chinese people to escape for 125 years of turmoil — topped by the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, the ensuing famine that killed 40 million people or more — and then the ten-year chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
Q: How are the geopolitical connections and compulsions going to shape China’s future course?
A: China will face increasing questions about its global role, and its relations with other Asian nations, including India. It cannot remain a primarily economic actor but will have to decide how it wants to assume wider responsibilities.

Q: How do you see China reconciling its inherent contradictions and the twin choices of being both a closed and an open economy?
A: This is a major issue for the present decade. China will have to open up more, and in hitherto protected sectors, if it wishes to maintain strong growth — otherwise it will be condemned to a basic economy and be caught in the “middle income trap”.

Q: How sustainable is the country’s growth, given the economic disparity that fast development has engendered?
A: It is sustainable, but at a lower growth rate than seen so far this century, say 7-8 per cent and a move to more advanced technologies and productive methods.

Q: What do you make of the repressive tactics of the People’s Republic? Are they necessary evils the Communist Party must resort to?
A: Control is at the centre of the Party’s DNA, as I write in my book. Traditionally, Chinese rulers have equated dissent with subversion. But society is evolving so fast in China that old-style repression will be increasingly difficult to implement.

Q: What all did you have to omit out of what must have been the voluminous research for the book?
A: I did not cover Chinese culture which I regret but there were limits to what I could include if the book was to be of manageable scale. I could also have included more material drawn from visits to China’s various regions, but I kept this to an overview and then focused sections on selected places that seemed to be significant in different ways.

Q: Where do you see China in the next decade?
A: As a great power, but one which, like most big nations, has to grapple with internal complexities and challenges — political, social, economic, environmental, etc. — and cannot simply progress as an economic powerhouse.

Q: Finally, what are you currently working on?
A: I am doing several projects, but my next book is due to be a biography of a Frenchman (I wrote a book on Charles de Gaulle before Tiger Head). But I would rather not say more at the moment since I have not even embarked on the research. I am also involved in a couple of television projects and write regularly for newspapers and magazines as well as doing broadcasts. I will be travelling to China in June and then visiting India in November.