BEIJING: An economist and an entrepreneur in the United States say they have confidence in the Chinese economy in the long run and that misunderstandings in the US about China’s private sector won’t be a drag on the country’s economy.
The optimization of COVID-19 measures “is going to be a significant positive for consumption in the months ahead. They (Chinese consumers) are sitting on a bunch of savings, so consumption is going to come back strongly from around the end of the first quarter and heading into the rest of the year,” said Tom Orlik, chief economist for Bloomberg Economics.
“There’s still reason for optimism about the Chinese consumer story relative to the rest of the world,” Orlik said at a recent webinar hosted by the Asia Society Northern California that looked at the Chinese economy for 2023.
In Washington and on Wall Street, there are concerns that China’s “regulatory crackdown on entrepreneurs” threatens the dynamism of the private sector, said Orlik, but they “get the common prosperity agenda wrong”.
Like policymakers in the US and Europe, China’s policymakers face a similar set of social and economic problems, such as inequality, low fertility rates and tech companies running riot, he said, adding that it’s “regulators doing their job”.
“Here in the US, we tend to frame the relationship between the state and the private sector in China in terms of conflict,” said Orlik.
The last 20 years isn’t the story of the state advancing and the private sector retreating, but the story of “the emergence of a bunch of really dynamic, really innovative and in many cases, world-beating private-sector Chinese firms”, he said. “I don’t think that’s the right way of thinking about the success of all of the entrepreneurs in Guangdong and Zhejiang following China’s entry into the WTO (World Trade Organization),” said Orlik.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
