China's institutions must grow with society
- By Wang Yukai
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People's Daily online, October 12, 2011
It is necessary to carefully research the special characteristics of China's social transition. One of the special characteristics is "dual transitions" – China needs to simultaneously complete both the task of social transition and the mission of institutional transition. China was faced with a dead end after adopting several decades of planned economy. Thereafter, China has been transforming from a planned economy to a market economy, the course of which was never seen in the social transitions of developed Western countries.
The vital issue facing China is that the institutional transition lacks the natural process of historical accumulation. Without the Opium War, China’s commodity economy and private economy could have developed to a certain sophisticated level. However, the Opium War Changed China's internal structure and hindered the development of the private economy, ruining the environment that would have nurtured a commodity economy in China.
After the Communist Party of China came into power in 1949, it chose the planned economy directly and skipped the commodity economy. China walked on the road of the planned economy for 30 years from 1949 to 1979, and then found a big brand standing on the road with two words on it: Dead End.
At that time, the planned economy had grown into a big tree with deep roots and flourishing branches and leaves, though with a few fruit. And it was already too late to completely cut down the tree of the planned economy and plant a small sapling of market economy.
Depending on the mighty strength of China and the Chinese government, Deng Xiaoping changed the direction of China's economy from a central planning to a market-oriented economy. One good point of this active turning was the rapid pace It was like keeping only the trunk and cutting off all the branches and leaves of the planned economy and then grafting the market economy on the trunk.
Grafting was an effective action, but it also meant that prices must be paid. That's why some virtues and good morals fostered in China in the past thousands of years have been washed out during the marketization reform of more than 30 years.
"A gentleman makes money in a right way" is an old saying of China. Unfortunately, many Chinese people currently would shamelessly do every dirty thing to get money, including producing low quality and harmful food products and fake medicine. This phenomenon is telling us that the social foundation and social order of China have already had problems. There are two kinds of forces that control members of the society: morality and the law. The effectiveness of the law is actually based on the effectiveness of what is moral, and if the foundation of what is moral goes wrong, all the laws will become useless no matter how many they are.
Therefore, the first thing that China should do currently is to rebuild the fundamental order of the society. How could we accept a country in which the modernization is realized, the GDP is high, but virtues and morals are lost? China needs to do something to prevent such a moral crisis from appearing right now.
This post was first published on Beijing Daily.
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