There is no chance that Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party will begin to think about facilitating market activity in China in a manner contradictory to Xi’s political-economic stewardship to date.
Bringing finance to heel
Le Monde reports that “China’s Xi Jinping brings finance to heel with arrests and salary caps” (December 15, 2024). Also: “The financial sector is under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party to give up its profits and put itself at the service of ‘common prosperity.’ ”
Prosperity without profits? How do you do that? You don’t. But all must submit to the destroyer-god Equality.
With top bank executives under investigation, salary cuts, calls to abandon extravagant spending and official speeches vehemently denouncing the sector, Beijing is forcing bankers to keep pace with “common prosperity.” This slogan, endorsed by President Xi Jinping in a speech in August 2021, has become a leitmotif. At a time when the economic slowdown could fuel social discontent, it is now synonymous with the fight against inequality.
As a result, dozens of officials at major banks, all majority state-owned, as well as from investment banks and brokerage firms, have been arrested as part of investigations led by the all-powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party. On November 26, Liu Liange [shown above], a former chairman of the Bank of China—one of the country’s four largest banks—was sentenced to death with a suspended sentence, which can be commuted to life imprisonment after two years of good behavior in detention. He is accused of having received the equivalent of €15 million in bribes.
In October 2023, the BBC reported:
Mr Liu’s arrest comes just about a week after he was expelled from China’s ruling Communist Party following accusations of wrongdoing by the country’s top anti-graft watchdog China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
The regulator accused Mr Liu of a range of illicit activities which led to significant financial risks.
These include accusations of illegally granting loans, bringing banned publications into the country and using his position in the bank to accept bribes and other perks such as invitations to private clubs and ski resorts.
Which is the worse sin: “bringing banned publications into the country” or accepting invitations to private clubs?
Guilt and innocence
Is somebody like Liu guilty of something or other that can be regarded as actually objectionable by some standard or other—not counting the kind of cooperation with the CCP regime without which one could not become a bank chairman?
Who knows? Corruption seems to be universal in China. If you’re the big boss, you don’t go after people for corruption unless you’re really going after them for other reasons. Who is as corrupt in every atom of his being as Xi Jinping? But no doubt Xi submits himself to his own will perfectly. So he can have no objection to himself on that count.
Taking the Russian Revolution as a starting point, we have more than a century of experience with modern socialism and communism to show us that destroying the means of achieving prosperity also destroys prosperity, and human life. We also have many able explications by economists, philosophers, and others about why the freedom to employ the means of achieving wealth and the freedom to keep what one has earned are required to achieve and expand prosperity. If we look and ponder, we can all understand that without markets, prices, incentives, entrepreneurship, and profit-seeking—and without allowing myriad inequalities—we cannot have prosperity.
But full communism and full capitalism are not the only two possible economic systems. After Mao, China instituted reforms to allow markets to function, but only somewhat, only up to a point and always in conjunction with totalitarian oversight and always subject to the state’s chronic intervention: a fascist system, one in which graft and bribery were part of the fabric.
China could become only richer than the country was in Mao’s time, for there was no other direction to go. But it is still much poorer than it might have been.
China’s future
To enable the Chinese economy to perform maximally, Xi should loosen his grip. Everywhere, totalitarian interferers in lives and livelihoods should loosen their grip. But if you give people an inch, they will take a mile, must be Xi’s opposing doctrine; in which case, in his view, the only thing to do with screws is tighten them.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Chasing the Shadows of Xi Jinping’s War on Corruption”
StopTheChinazis.org: “China’s Corruption and Anti-corruption Are Forever”
