The Age of Great Growth Is Over. What Should We Be Wary Of, and What Should We Fear? | Living With the Future, Part 3

Where the risks lie ahead; the weakness hiding behind our popular culture; what it means when technology and bureaucracy merge; and, above all, the extra price we pay in a society where civil society is missing.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world, but to explain it."

At a moment like this one, on how to explain the world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise, independent voices.

We asked our questions to more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on the lives of the younger generation. The people we interviewed hope that the world handed to that generation works well and keeps advancing as a civilization — and that in a confusing, complicated world, people hold on to independence and reason.

In the previous installment, our interviewees argued that unstoppable currents decide whether the consensus built over the past decades survives. Over a long enough span, neither worldwide globalization — with the universal values of civilization and progress it carries — nor China's integration into the world can be reversed. So although the problems right now are many, we can still be optimistic.

Below is the third installment in the series. It is about where the risks lie ahead; the weakness hiding behind our popular culture; what it means when technology and bureaucracy merge; and, above all, the extra price we pay in a society where civil society is missing.

Asked "Will the world be all right?", whether an interviewee says yes or no hardly matters. What matters is what they tell us to fear, and what to watch for.

1. Does the Government Really Understand What "the Good Life" Is?

Officials had just learned how to court investors — now they are suddenly responsible for "the good life"

He Fan, professor at Peking University HSBC Business School

The good news is that the 19th Party Congress already said it: "the yearning for a good life" has been put forward as a key phrase. The bad news is that the government itself hasn't changed yet.

Our situation now is a little like the early 1980s. Back then the principal contradiction was supposed to be between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, so class struggle was the guiding principle. Officials were used to grasping class struggle, and then all at once they were told: no more class struggle, we're building the economy now. They panicked. They had no idea how to build an economy. Slowly they adjusted, and now they know how it goes: court businesses, bring in capital, improve the investment climate, do a bit of innovation — right down to how to sell land and set up industrial parks. They have all of that down cold. And now, suddenly, you tell them again: no, growth isn't the only thing we look at anymore, we look at "the good life." What is this good life? They panic again. They have never done this before, so there's a fair chance some latent risks turn up right here.

A prosperous life may not be the whole of it

He Fan, professor at Peking University HSBC Business School

As incomes rise and the age structure of the population shifts, new risks appear. The generation gap, for instance: the older generation doesn't understand the younger one.

We hold a lot of simple assumptions right now — that as long as I keep making your life more prosperous, that must be the good life. It isn't. The next generation thinks differently from the last. Look at 1968, when a youth movement broke out almost everywhere in the world. Take the May Storm in Paris. By rights France had already reached the good life by then, because for the first time in several centuries the country had suddenly entered a stretch of peace and plenty, the best conditions it had ever known.

But that generation of young people, unlike the wartime generation, had never lived through a war, so they didn't think this peaceful, well-fed life was anything special. They felt confused instead, then stifled, and they rose up. Once they did, the walls of Paris filled with student slogans. One of them read: "I want to express my own opinion, but I don't know what to say." Nothing captures the anxiety of a young generation more completely than that line. They didn't even know what they wanted. They just knew they were dissatisfied.

That's the awkward part. Many of our policies aren't built on any forward-looking grasp of the new social problems, the new generation, the new population. When that's true, mistakes in the response become likely. So the risk, I think, isn't economic. The risk is social.

2. Why Does the Provider of Public Services Put So Few Resources Into Public Services?

Human-capital-intensive services ran into trouble, and the government's answer was "dispersal"

Zhang Bin, researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

You can see we are moving from manufacturing to services, and growth has slowed somewhat. That happens naturally. Industrial upgrading in manufacturing is in decent shape, and services are shifting toward the human-capital-intensive kind. Both follow international experience. What drives this is a change in what we want. Once incomes rise, people want a better life. What does a better life depend on? Better manufactured goods, certainly, but better service matters more — service that takes more human capital, not low-end service but mid- and high-end service. So far, on the whole, things are fine.

This year, even with growth a little slower, the structure of the economy is changing in the right direction. Plenty of people worry about whether China will fall into the middle-income trap, whether China will fail to become a high-income country. On that point there's no need to worry much. Look at international experience: there is no case in history of a country that allocated resources in roughly the standard market way, passed the peak of its industrialization, and still failed to become a high-income country. Many people treat high-income countries and industrialized countries as the same thing. China's industrialization has been textbook: per capita GDP reached US$8,000–10,000, industry's share of GDP was around 40%, and the transition began. All of this looks like the equivalent stage in high-income countries — China is very standard here. From here, our industrial upgrading is going reasonably well, and human-capital-intensive industries are developing too. I have never doubted that China will become a high-income country, because the threshold isn't high: a bit over US$12,000 by today's standard.

So what structural problem does China actually face? It's how far you go after you cross that threshold. What I just described is the optimistic half. The shortfalls are just as plain, and they show up along two dimensions. The first you can feel in daily life. What is most missing from your life? Where do your needs go unmet? Bluntly: elderly people seeing a doctor, children going to school, and housing. Behind housing is not the house but the transport, medical care, education and jobs the house gives you access to. Behind that is public services. Elderly care and schooling are service questions too. What we really lack now is human-capital-intensive services. Have those services improved noticeably in the past few years? Even where they have, the improvement is small. This is a matter of lived experience, of course, and everyone feels it differently. But the feeling I'm describing isn't mine alone. Many people share it.

Low urbanization and poor urban services are a failure of government public services — and our government has used that failure to make an even more absurd decision

Zhang Bin, researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The other dimension comes from comparison with international experience. Set China beside high-income countries at a similar stage of development and you find gaps. First gap: employment in China's secondary and tertiary industries is still too small a share, and the primary industry — mostly agriculture — too large. Second gap: broken down by sector, government services take up a very small share. Against high-income countries at the same stage, ours is far smaller. Government services, on the UN's fairly broad definition, cover medical care, education, public health, defense, administration and much more. We are on the low side. A third gap is the urbanization rate. In developed countries, urbanization reached roughly 70% once industrialization was complete. China, even in 2016, was only around 57%.

These three are versions of the same thing: low urbanization; too many people employed in agriculture and too few in the secondary and tertiary industries; low public services. They are three faces of a single fact — that over the course of growth, many people could not follow industrialization into the cities and enjoy urban public services, because the cities never provided those services to them. That is the gap between China and many high-income countries at a comparable historical stage. And what does the gap tell us? It tells us our land policy is badly deficient when it comes to urban public services. Not measured against high-income countries today, but against high-income countries at a similar stage of development — still a wide gap. This is a lesson we have to catch up on.

And what lies behind the gap? An inadequate definition of what government is for. The resources haven't been put here — not the economic resources, and not the policy direction or the definition of the government's job either. In the past we always stressed development, development, development: more projects, more production. But how much public resource has actually gone into public services? That is the wide gap we face now.

This matches what I said about daily life. One thing is missing: public services haven't kept up. Why the shortfall? Because the definition of the government's job is wrong. It has overweighted development, and it is out of balance. Your principal contradiction is no longer development itself, but meeting society's sharpest needs by providing better services. Are policy resources being redirected that way? Are fiscal resources adjusting that way? Perhaps somewhat — but not fast enough to keep up with how demand is changing.

The government knows how to "run projects." It hasn't learned how to provide services

Zhang Bin, researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Now to the structural problem. What our economy really lacks is the development of these services, and driving it requires the government to change what it does. How do you drive that change? Many people would say vested interests block it. In China I think vested interests are one factor, but not the main one — there is still Party leadership, after all, and that isn't an empty phrase. Mindset matters more. A large share of people still believe that the experience accumulated over decades of development is about how to build and how to invest. They rarely think about how to provide public services, and no incentive has been set up to push them to provide good ones. They apply their old formula for success to the present, and it is still running projects, not providing services. That is a matter of mindset.

3. What's Wrong With the Phrase "Concentrate Resources to Accomplish Big Things"?

Centralized power really does raise efficiency, but once it turns totalitarian it harms everyone, itself included

Ma Yong, researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe ten years. On the most pessimistic estimate, maybe thirty. I think the tempo of human society and history is speeding up, so I don't believe thirty. In thirty years we could burn through everything we accumulated over the past several decades. And look at the international trend: Western democracies are pressing China so hard now, and there is fear behind that.

I think Steve Bannon is a "prophet." He really did see that the Cold War is still in play. The Soviet Union broke up, but the Cold War never ended. Look at Russia, China and North Korea today — same question. Democratic systems have one big problem, though. Under a democracy, even when there are "prophets" like Bannon trying to resolve the problem, mobilizing a democracy is extremely hard. As long as people can get by, they feel no active urge to intervene against a dictatorship. Look at the 1930s, at Mussolini and Hitler: those countries had democratic systems at the time, and citizens did see what was happening, but everyone minded their own business and no one moved to contain them. That is also why centralized power is efficient.

But centralized power must not turn totalitarian. Centralized power can make a country efficient; once it turns totalitarian, it harms the people. The tipping point is right there. China's future may change through exactly that kind of accident — at some chance moment nobody saw coming. Look back over the past hundred-odd years: that is always how it has gone. If we can't reach a healthy state, a sudden change like that becomes likely. So it could be tomorrow, it could be ten years, it could be five. It depends on how the whole international landscape shifts and how the various forces inside China change.

4. Why Should We Be Wary of Technology Like Facial Recognition?

The core of bureaucratic ideology is to treat control as the supreme goal, and modern technology largely satisfies that demand for control

Hong Tao, professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

Look at the history of the 20th century and you can see which technologies grew fastest: those serving war, and those serving control. When I stay in hotels, I find that many now use facial recognition to check you in. The electronic computer was first developed because a war required it. There are two sides to this — war abroad, control at home — and at bottom both serve control. Control is the core of the modern worldview: control of nature, control of other people or of society, control of the human body and mind. In the 17th and 18th centuries, technologies for controlling nature grew fast; in the 19th and 20th, technologies for controlling society and other people grew intensely; now, in the 21st, control technology aims not only at the individual but at every moment of that individual, every movement of the body. Technologies that control the body's own functions — life sciences, genetic engineering and the rest — will now develop quickly, and all of them will serve those in power in their direct or indirect control over the human body.

To control the lived world and to control themselves, modern people invented two things: modern technology and modern organization (chiefly bureaucratic organization). Bureaucracy is very old, but bureaucratic organization fused with technology took shape in the early modern period, the age of the absolutist state. From then on, governments began applying technical means and organizational tools to the control of every individual in society. That process started in the 17th and 18th centuries, has accelerated ever since, and in the 21st century it may change the political face of humanity from the ground up.

Max Weber wrote a great deal about bureaucracy and rather little about technology. The technological side can't be ignored, I think, because rationalization shows itself mainly in technical progress. Today there is probably not one country willing to reflect seriously on what technical progress and its use do to human nature, to society, to humanity. Building a fully controlled society is their shared ideal. Wouldn't it be nice to put a camera in every corner? And better still to put a monitor on every person? Crime would vanish completely. Governments are all very eager now to spread these technologies and these methods of management. Why? Because they help with control. The core ideology of bureaucracy is that administrative convenience or efficiency is the only demand, or at least the supreme one — and technology can deliver that convenience and efficiency.

The future George Orwell foresaw in Nineteen Eighty-Four is our present. There is some distance between his prediction and our reality: for him technical control was oppressive, while our technical control today is neither so open nor so unwelcome — it unfolds in forms the people enjoy. That doesn't mean coercion is absent. Coercion is precisely its hidden core.

Control technology now develops at an accelerating rate. Neither bureaucratization nor technical control shows any sign of slowing, and no other force restrains them: bureaucratic power has destroyed every social force independent of it, and technology's grip on human life has largely blocked people from becoming subjects at all. I see no hope. I believe that very soon it will no longer be possible for anyone to "plan" or "design" their own life. Human "freedom" will be redefined as being temporarily unnoticed by power. Fundamentally everyone lives under tight control, and only when power isn't looking does a temporary "freedom" appear. The one thing a person can do is pray to escape the eye of power.

The modern state doesn't just control individuals in a general way; it can locate any individual at any moment. It can find any individual and know their circumstances, and it can act directly on their body and mind. The individual has no room to resist and no way at all to escape the state's control. The idea of the individual as an agent responsible for their acts is no longer clear today; we will reach a point where a person can no longer answer for their own behavior, because they are being controlled from a distance, or at the very least restrained from a distance. The modern concept of the "subject" will then face a crisis: modernity's own products — the human being as a moral and legal subject, self-determination, self-responsibility and so on — all become obsolete notions under modern total-control technology. In a society where people are fully controlled (as in Nineteen Eighty-Four), I don't know what meaning or value life still holds for people, at least for the great majority who can be controlled at will. Perhaps the occasional moment of breaking loose is the meaning and the value.

This is the logic of the modern state. Its power has soaked through and taken hold of the whole of society; its tentacles reach every individual. To control all of society, to control every individual, to control every minute of every individual, every twitch of muscle, every thought they have — that is the ideal of the modern state. The day it is realized, I think, is probably not far off.

What if my neighbor had my file…

Hong Tao, professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

The author of The File: A Personal History (Guangxi Normal University Press; the author is Timothy Garton Ash) writes that in the 1970s, in East Germany, someone watched him wherever he went — he even suspected his girlfriend had been sent to watch him. And yet in Britain today the means of control are far more powerful than East Germany's were then. Why? Not because Britain has become a secret-police state like East Germany, but because technology has advanced so fast that even a modern democracy now has means of control beyond anything the old despotic states could reach.

There is a scene in the 1980s British series Yes, Minister where the press debates a question: what if the person holding my file happens to live next door? He knows everything about me — how am I supposed to live in front of my neighbor? Today's big data collects more personal information, more comprehensive and more wide-ranging, and stores and transmits it so easily that the problem of privacy is beyond question far more serious.

Yet we barely discuss a question this important. Rulers simply tell ordinary people to give up their privacy. Chinese people today have no privacy. Only ordinary people have none, of course; the rulers have theirs. They all carry the Ring of Gyges.

The first principle of bureaucratic ideology is the convenience or efficiency of bureaucratic control, and to that end any more effective tool or technical means within reach will inevitably be adopted; any such technology that can be developed inevitably will be. China, I am certain, will do this better than anyone. Since the 20th century Chinese people have had a kind of worship of technology: if it is new it must be good, and very few are willing to reflect on where technical development leads. In the modern state, power is wholly unrestrained; the powerful can do anything to ordinary people, who have no way to object, because everything is done in secret. Nor do rulers feel that installing surveillance and listening devices everywhere, or poisoning and drugging people, sits badly with the "rule of law" they invoke at every turn — because they alone enjoy full and unconditional "freedom."

5. Why Are "Small but Certain Happiness" and "Small but Certain Despair" Signs of Submission to a Culture of Force and Acceptance of the "Order of Power"?

What Counts as a "Normal" Outlook on Life

— Dai Jinhua, professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University

What I have been trying lately to observe and understand is the so-called "small but certain despair." It probably needs no precise definition, and I would find it hard to explain in the abstract. As I sense it, it connects to another pair of 2017 buzzwords — "Buddha-like youth" and "the hardening of class lines" — and put that way it isn't hard to understand.

I have said many times in talks that, setting aside Tiny Times as a film and a novel, its value and meaning, and setting aside for now the question of fan culture, at the level of the social unconscious one reason it drew in so many young people is that it expressed, without meaning to, a certain understanding and naming of the era.

The 20th century ended — I agree with the formulation that it in fact ended at the turn of the 1980s and 90s. Its end also opened a worldwide project of cultural construction: we bid farewell to revolution and, at the same time, to the grand era. So we embraced the "small era." Embracing the small era comes down to this: we exist only as individuals, only as persons, and all we possess is the short span of one life, from birth to death.

This way of understanding life and the world gave the Eileen Chang craze — which surged alongside the "rewriting of literary history" — an effect nobody expected. "Years of quiet grace, a stable present" became the finest condition of life we could hope to reach. From that logic came "small but certain happiness": the trivial, the just-about-good-enough, the daily business of rice and cooking oil — the slight happiness a single life might actually reach and hold.

It is rather funny, really. Leave everything else aside: "years of quiet grace, a stable present" — when Eileen Chang wrote that line she was living through chaos and had fallen for the wrong man. It was a wish she could long for and never reach. In the same way, when people today chase the "small but certain happiness" that came to us by way of Taiwan, they overlook, or never knew, its source: in Haruki Murakami it expressed a deep exhaustion, perhaps a bitterness, at the triviality and helplessness of life. But in the present context, when "years of quiet grace, a stable present" is no longer just a wish for a good life or an "ordinary mind" but the highest ideal of life itself, people soon find that this pursuit, even as it strips away and cuts itself off in advance from any pursuit of transcendent life and value, foregrounds daily life and with it the material basis of daily life. So even this limited "happiness" is not easy to come by. The smile of "small but certain happiness" then slides readily into the spread of "small but certain despair" — all the small defeats, the small helplessness, the small room left to rise or to be satisfied. Calling it "small but certain despair" may itself amount, unintentionally, to a piece of self-deception. When we fix on these small defeats and small helplessnesses, we may be conveniently overlooking the fact that our whole life is blocked.

Watching this "small" world, I have come to recognize a culture that leaves me personally very discouraged. I don't know whether it belongs only to the "post-whatever-0s" generations; as I sense it, it isn't confined to youth pop culture but runs as an underground stream through the wider social culture: a powerful, internalized acceptance of the order of power — the strong stay strong, the weak stay weak. Or, put differently: the weak must answer for being weak, and the strong have their own inherent grounds for being strong. As I understand it, the premise of this inward submission is that "change is impossible."

That seems to have become a consensus, or a common sense: every effort to change reality seems to mean only greater destruction, the loss of the little "small but certain happiness" we already hold. In that sense "small but certain happiness" and "small but certain despair" share one logic. Because every defeat is deemed reasonable and every structural cause behind it deemed irreversible, all that is left is to bear it or embrace it, to accept these impossibilities. Recognizing that, I find this cultural fact genuinely alarming. In themselves the "small era," "small but certain happiness" and "small but certain despair" are unobjectionable. Calling something a trend implies it will rise and pass quickly, not worth dwelling on. But on this side of the generation gap I see a structural foundation far stronger than any trend, and that foundation is what discourages me, even saddens me.

(Many young people today may genuinely accept the order of power. Few feel any impulse to rebel or resist; everyone is quite obedient.)

Exactly. Once change and resistance are agreed to be impossible, what follows necessarily is a drift toward stigmatizing every idealistic pursuit and every idealistic statement — labels like "the idealism crowd," or "hypocrites." At the lowest level, imagine a world filled with "honest scoundrels." It is genuinely chilling.

6. How Should We Think About the Coarsening of Society? And Why Should We Be Even More Wary of Idealism Being Stigmatized?

Society Hasn't Shown the Vitality and Drive It Should

— Dai Jinhua, professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University

I don't actually think our era is coarsening faster and faster. In one sense, as prosperity grows, people are searching — somewhat blindly, and very anxiously — for a way of living with some quality to it. It's like our millionaires all having to climb Everest: they are learning how to be rich. Foreigners often ask me why our top-tier wealthy all want to climb Everest. I honestly don't know why. Thinking it over, I suspect they are trying to acquire a way of life that matches their money. Because we have no settled upper, middle and lower classes yet, we also have no settled social forms or content to go with them. Everything is changing fast.

So China's new middle class is likewise trying to learn a middle-class life, trying to find what is interior to that life. People want a house and a car, but once they have them, how do we go looking for the interior part? Doting on cats and dogs is one form. So is the return of reading habits, or rising reading volumes, and all the paid-content businesses that may be drawing people in — and not just shows about how to get rich fast, but all kinds of cultural products that have started to hold people's attention. I think people are all trying to find something more interior and less material in daily life.

In that sense I don't think society is coarsening. The problem is that once all the drive to chase dreams and change society is gone, the culture of society as a whole has not, I think, shown vitality and drive to match China's economic growth. "Small but certain despair" is exactly the symptom of that missing vitality and drive in the social culture. Roughly in that sense I read mainstream hip-hop, or today's popular cross-talk comedy. I miss more the era of sketch comedy we once had, or the era when social jokes and political jokes were current. On the surface those might look like an oppositional force, but what they really expressed was a social vitality, a sense of engagement and of things shared. In today's popular culture I do not see social vitality growing alongside economic vitality, and that is what worries me.

7. Why Has Every Level of Our Society Lost Mutual Trust?

The kindergarten cases lay bare a society with no sense of security, where the machinery of trust between people has been wrecked

Wang Jianxun, associate professor at China University of Political Science and Law

The kindergarten cases matter, I think, and they are worth attention, because what they reflect is a problem of trust between people. We hand our children over to you — you are supposed to be the most trustworthy people there are — and it turns out you can't be trusted, I have no way to believe in you. Isn't that a serious crisis for a society?

If a society loses even basic trust, that society is a frightening place. If a person is forever guarding against everyone else, how can there be cooperation, how can there be mutual aid, how can there be collective action? Without those things, how would you ever change an authoritarian system? Without collective action you cannot change an authoritarian system, because it doesn't run on one person's strength; it takes countless people joining together. And the basic precondition for countless people joining together is that they trust one another. Only then can they unite. If I don't trust you, there is no way I can cooperate with you, unite with you, do something together — right?

It isn't only kindergartens, of course. A great many things happening in this society show that we lack even basic trust. People who helped an elderly person who had fallen and were then shaken down for money — that too is a failure of trust. As a result nobody dares help anyone up anymore; if someone falls, let them lie there. All of it comes down to trust. People's hearts have gone bad. Once hearts have gone bad, a society is very hard to save, and very dangerous. If the government were the only trouble, that would be manageable — provided ordinary people hadn't gone bad. But if hearts have all gone bad, saving this society will take a very long time.

The causes are fairly complex, and I think they come from several directions.

On one side it has to do with the current system. Why don't we dare help a fallen old person up? Because the courts have handed down strange rulings that back the very people doing the shaking down. Such a ruling should never happen, under any circumstances. You have used the system to back the ill-intentioned. Isn't that encouraging exactly this kind of behavior in society?

But on the other side, I think it also has to do with us. When we raise our children, for instance, parents almost always tell them: whatever you do, don't talk to strangers. That plants a premise — all strangers are bad people. Everyone raises children this way. We don't ask who this stranger is, or what they need. We apply one blanket rule and tell children not to speak to strangers. Western parents would never raise children like this. If that stranger happens to be in trouble and badly needs help, and you ignore them, they might die. This shows how, because we lack a sense of security from childhood, we teach children not to trust other people. Generation after generation grows up that way, until, apart from your own friends, family and the people closest to you, you trust nobody, and there is no relationship of trust between strangers at all. Both the family and the school bear responsibility for it.

And of course this extends to how we deal with each other online and so on. Many spheres affect trust between people. Take contracts: people break them at the drop of a hat. And after a breach you might even lose the lawsuit, with the other side winning. All of this affects trust between people, including the fact that the legal liability for breaking a contract is set too light, which encourages people not to keep their word. Break it, so what — I'll pay you a bit of compensation. We don't have a system where breaking a contract that casually gets you punished severely, made to pay a huge sum, ruined.

Many aspects also connect to Chinese tradition. In China the family has always been the basic unit. The people we trust are those inside the family and the clan; beyond it our relations grow distant. This is Fei Xiaotong's "differential mode of association" — kinship at different degrees carries different weight. It is tied to many factors at once.

What if the wealthy stop believing in the system?

Tang Shiping, professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

One of the most frightening problems is surely that China's wealthy lose confidence in the whole system. The government can of course use plenty of controls to limit wealth flowing out. But that still doesn't solve the incentive problem for investors, because wealth that isn't invested is only collecting interest. It isn't doing the work of capital (wealth is not the same thing as capital).

So what worries me is that China's wealthy will stop believing this system can bring them a return. To solve that, the government has to make its own commitments credible, and it has to get the direction of reform right.

8. Isn't Everyone Capable of Making Mistakes?

How much criticism the ruling party can take is a test of why it exists at all

Sheng Hong, economist and director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent Chinese think tank

I worry about this ruling party. It has no tradition of criticism. One or two people hold very senior positions, and whatever they say, nobody dares raise a different view, dares offer a criticism. And those very senior people may well be making mistakes. That is what worries me. But I also know that, strictly speaking, the Communist Party has never had a good tradition of criticism. It mainly dates from the Mao era — Mao simply would not allow anyone to criticize him. If the party consists entirely of yes-men, though, what is the point of it? When something goes wrong, why does no one step up and say, let's discuss this inside the party first? Why is there only one voice inside the party? What is the value of its existence then?

Without bold reform there is no stable, sustainable growth for the Chinese economy

Wei Sen, professor at the School of Economics, Fudan University

In recent years, measured by trade elasticity, globalization has clearly gone into negative growth. Trade elasticity measures whether trade rises or falls for each additional yuan of GDP. Below 1 means global trade is shrinking; above 1 means trade is rising and globalization is speeding up. Over the past few years trade globalization really has receded sharply, especially with Trump declaring publicly that America comes first and leading the way into trade protectionism. Other developed countries have done the same. But capital chases profit, so trade still has to happen. The main cause of the China-US trade war isn't purely economic. The main issue is that Trump has cast China as an imagined enemy, and this has been brewing a long time. On the evening of January 26 this year, Trump gave the closing address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In it he said: "We are also working to reform the international trading system so that everyone who plays by the rules can benefit. If we want free trade, we cannot allow some countries to exploit this system at others' expense. We support free trade, but it must also be fair and it must be reciprocal, because unfair trade undermines all of our efforts. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to that kind of unilateral behavior, including large-scale intellectual-property theft and state-directed planned economies." International media read this as criticism of China: the US would never allow China's "state-directed planned economy" to disrupt the international trade order through "predatory trade." It can in effect be read as the Trump administration's declaration of a trade war on China. How the war already under way will be fought, how it will end, how it will be settled, what its effects will be — we still have to watch.

From last year into this, many people at home, policymakers included, have been fairly worried about financial risk. At last year's Phoenix Finance annual forum I argued personally that it wasn't that serious yet. The key thing is that China must never leave the path of market-oriented reform. Reform and opening has run 40 years, and the Chinese economy has grown for more than 30 of them. There are a thousand lessons of success, and they come down to one: we got the path of market-oriented reform right, and that gave rise, in early form, to the market economy China has today. If China leaves that path, the economy won't necessarily crash — but entrepreneurs will lose confidence, they will emigrate and move their assets abroad, young people will lose confidence too, and no one will have any drive to start a business. In that case the Chinese economy may not suffer any great shock, but it will slowly decline. That is where the real danger lies.

Without bold reform there is also no long-term, stable, sustainable growth for the Chinese economy. I don't know what the post-80s and post-90s generations think. When the tension of reform builds too far, it snaps. And snapping means revolution. China cannot withstand revolution, cannot withstand a great upheaval. For years now I have kept saying that we have to work off, slowly, the problems and contradictions that have piled up over the course of reform. The more society is controlled, the higher social tension climbs, the greater the tension of reform grows, and the more the drive behind economic growth decays. In the end society turns extremely rigid and extremely brittle. That is no small thing: it could destroy decades of reform in a single stroke.

Our good times are over. For the past 30 years there was no large-scale war anywhere in the world, every country was carrying out market-oriented reform, private enterprise was rising, and every country's economy was growing. In those 30 years China caught the great wave of globalization and joined the global division of labor with an enormous, low-cost labor force, and that produced rapid growth. Those 30 years were a rare opportunity. It was a good era, and it has ended; from here the trouble will only mount.

The last thing to say is that innovation, creativity and industrial upgrading — the growth of companies, even — all need a climate of freedom. The other side of freedom is the rule of law. Without freedom, without a relaxed climate, many entrepreneurs and ordinary people will see no bright future ahead, and where would creativity come from then? Where would a company's creativity come from? If China's entrepreneurs have no drive to innovate, no drive to make their companies stronger and larger, how could China's economy have long-term, stable, sustainable growth in the future?

(More reporting to come, updated in installments)

The people interviewed for this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: a still from the film The Lives of Others, via Douban