Transcript: China Chat
Utley: Could we have the first question from the first caller, please? Please identify yourself.
Male voice: I am Fred Blackstone. It's hard to swallow that last statement that in the article that China, that communism no longer exists. Can that be justified?
Utley: All right. Thank you very much. There's still a communist party, is there still a communist ideology. Does communism still exist? How do we define communism?
Lu: It depends on how you look at it. The ideology is rapidly fading away. If you look at Chinese society today, what you see is a sort of a capitalism running amuck. If someone studies American economic history this recalls the late 19th century in America, more or less, so when you have a booming market economy but a lack of rule of law. Now if you're talking about communism as an organization, as a ruling party, yes, it's still there and it's still rules the country and it's still a one party rules so, it depends on how you look at it.
Xue: Certainly the communist party in China is very different from the communist party in say, people's mind, in the U.S. or in the Western world. The party itself has changed a great deal. It's changing to a much more practical and pragmatic sort of objectives for the society. And you know, so if you view those things that would be very different from the kind of communist party that one had in mind in say, like the party in Russia and so on.
Simon: The notion that the Chinese Communist party is simply made up of apparatchiks, I think that is really what's changing. There was a series of conferences recently held by the party, and in various comments, leaders indicated that the Party's talent base must bring in more qualified individuals with a science/technology/managerial backgrounds, that the Party can no longer simply have a unitary view about who its members are and what role in society it should play. It's going to be more pluralist. Clearly China's not on the road to becoming a democracy today. At the same time, we can now discern that the new people who are taking the reins of power do have a greater commitment to openness and pluralism.
Utley: We know China can manufacture all kinds of goods, and sell them at low cost around the world. But in today's world and tomorrow's world innovation, knowledge-level workers, high-end workers are going to be key. Does China have the innovation in its DNA that's going to be required to compete once it becomes an older population.
Fischer: China's an interesting economic player in that it will probably always be the lowest cost manufacturer in most industries because it has such a huge pool of untapped labor in the interior but at the same time, what we're beginning to see is because of the education system which is very, very good, and because of the ambitiousness of a lot of the young people because of the sophistication, some of the major metropolitan areas, I think we're going to see China increasingly become a major contributor to R&D and a variety of thought-leadership sorts of issues, popular music, entertainment, things of this nature. We're already seeing evidence that China is a major contributor in terms of intellectual strength as well as low-wage labor.
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