Not a market economy? Tell that to China's public
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In China, agreement with GlobeScan's survey statement jumped by 5 percentage points last year to 67 percent. This may well be attributed to people's reaction to the "State-Progress-Private-Regress" (SPPR) phenomenon. In a narrow sense, SPPR refers to market share expansion of the State-owned economy, and the market share shrinkage, or even entire elimination of private enterprises in certain industry sectors, especially since the 2008 financial crisis.
In other words, the approval for the free market may have been a "protest vote," against China's bloated State economy.
But more importantly, for the first time the percentage of people in China in favor of the free market economy is higher than that in the US. So now we have a bizarre situation where the country that has a smaller constituency of free market believers refuses to recognize the market economy status of another that has a much larger percentage of believers in free enterprises.
Now of course the result of a poll doesn't count toward the market economy status analysis at the US Commerce Department. It uses a six-factor analysis that includes evaluating a country's currency convertibility, whether wage rates are determined by free bargaining in the labor market, how much foreign investment is welcomed, overnment ownership in corporations in the economy, government controls over the allocation of resources and over the price and output decision of enterprises, and "other factors as the administering authority considers appropriate."
But regardless of the entanglements in these technical details on whether China has come to meet these criteria, it is clear that fundamentally both Chinese and Americans are very much alike in terms of political economy ideology. Those of us who have been exposed to both cultures for a long time know very well that people on the two continents are all economic animals – at birth and genetically, extremely entrepreneurial, hardworking, and firmly believing in free enterprise.
The author is an associate professor of the Beijing-based University of International Business and Economics. johngong@gmail.com
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