'Unique' China defies world's predictions
By Xu Binglan (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-21 08:32

(Continued)

China Daily: Any comments on China's approach to reform?

Huang: In the mid-1990s, people compared China with Eastern Europe and with Latin America and the general view was that those countries follow rapid reform programmes, they believed in changing their policies very quickly.

China was considered a slow reformer. It did not want to do things quickly. It wanted to test things out. It wanted to manage its reform process. And it was concerned about stability.

People did not think of China positively because of this. They tended to think Chinese leadership was too cautious, too conservative.

Foreign governments were more ambitious and more open to ideas and more willing to change. Observers tended to think of them positively.

Today, the views are completely different. People began to say 'China's reform is dramatic.' The view is still not yet fully formed. But 10 years ago there was something called Washington Consensus, which is views about reform, about free markets, about the role of capitalism. They tended to say 'If you follow this model you will succeed.' And there was a view that China's model was the wrong one. Too slow, too much control, too whatever.

Today, there is something being discussed, debated, something called the Beijing Consensus.

China's reform has been actually very, very fast. Faster even than the leadership would have thought it could happen. The reason for the speed goes back to the point I talked about, competition.

A lesson from this is that a managed reform can also lead to rapid change. This is something that is still not fully understood yet internationally. I understood this here. If I was sitting in Washington, I would not have known this.

My guess is that in the next five years, people will be talking about the rapid changes in China, what kind of reform process they have, and how it could be modelled for other countries.

This is such a different topic than when I came here in 1997. People are now much more positive about China's performance today.

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