Willy Wo-Lap Lam
Are President Xi Jinping’s recent turn to liberalized measures on technology firms and his commitment to using infrastructure projects to boost the economy an indication that the supreme leader has adopted a relatively pro-market approach to policymaking? At a late April Politburo meeting, Xi, who is also General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said that Beijing would promote the “healthy development” of the internet platform economy through “normalizing control over the tech sector,” and that specific measures would be taken to boost high technology industries, especially information technology (IT) conglomerates. Xi has also stopped mentioning the goal of “common prosperity,” which has been used as a pretext to squeeze tycoons running multi-billion-dollar technology giants (CCTV.com, May 2; SCMP, April 29). At the same time, Xi is pulling out all the stops to ensure that this year’s GDP growth target of 5.5 percent is reached. The “core of the CCP leadership” has emphasized that the Chinese economy must expand at a higher rate than that of the United States in order to demonstrate “the superiority of the Chinese system” (Deutsche Welle Chinese, April 27; Radio French International, April 27).
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