悉尼先驱晨报：全面民主化 中国面临的挑战

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　　中国要想保持经济高速增长及社会稳定，全面民主化是唯一的选择。
　　澳大利亚出口价格一个世纪以来一直不错。但黄金时期已经过去，未来也就能和过去几年相当。
　　仅上周铁矿石价格就下跌了9.4%，而巴西至中国的货运价格下跌了20%。中国贸易数据显示，一直到5月份，铁矿石进口量平均每月都同比上升8.4%，6月份则同比下跌14%。
　　去年中国购买了世界铁矿石出口量的70%，澳大利亚今年铁矿石出口价值约500亿美元。不难看出，澳大利亚因中国购买旋风而获得巨大国民收入的情况将不再继续。6月，中国煤、铝、铜的进口也都相应下降。
　　澳大利亚百年一次资源繁荣的深层原因在于中国重工业的增长速度比整体经济要快很多。
　　在我看来，中国政府将市场经济与政治集权混合一体的治理方式使得中国经济出现了扭曲，正是这种扭曲膨胀了澳大利亚的上述繁荣。
　　
　　现在的问题是，一系列经济法令已经扭转了这种模式。两个月来，钢产量一直在明显下降。6月份，下降速度进一步加快。很多钢铁厂家赶在钢材出口退税政策取消以前大量出口钢材，但不过是一次性激增而已。
　　未来10年内，中国资源消耗趋势--同样包括澳大利亚的国家收入状况--将部分取决于消费者及投资者的偏好。中国人均汽车拥有量将增加20倍赶上美国？从社会生态学上来讲可能吗？
　　所有这些个人选择都将受到中国政府或面对或逃避的政策决定及政治抉择的影响。参加澳大利亚国立大学中国最新发展状况研讨会的知名经济学家们将讨论中国面临的种种挑战。
　　赵中祥（音译，Zhao Zhongxiang）将探讨中国在减少化石燃料消耗方面的努力。去年，中国安装的风力发电涡轮机比任何其他国家都多。但由于未能并入电网，今年第一季度这些发电机60%的发电能力都被浪费。
　　黄益平(音译：Huang Yiping)将关注推动重工业产业繁荣的不合理价格因素，包括廉价土地，廉价能源及廉价资本。
　　蔡昉（音译：Cai Fang）将分析将农民工看成二等公民从而大大限制城市化速度的“户口”政策，以及政府正在如何放宽这些限制。
　　休·麦凯（Hugh McKay）和宋立刚（音译：Song Ligang）将讨论中国人均钢铁消费量将如何在未来10年多一点的时间里按照目前消费量两倍的速率更早达到高峰期。
　　不过，未来数年内，对上述重要趋势及政策的讨论都将被一党制国家是否及如何使自己成为负责任的大国这个关键问题所淹没。
　　只要官员继续获得大笔财政奖励且不因收受贿赂及盗窃农民土地受到政治及法律制裁，过度建设就会继续存在。
　　只要服务行业继续被政治上强大的国有垄断企业所阻碍，国家主导的重工业将继续过度生产。
　　如果不能形成能够解决而不是镇压政治不满的机制，整个大厦都有坍塌的危险。
　　因此，国务院发展研究中心张永生(音译，Zhang Yongsheng)将探讨由上级任命并由中央政府支付工资的地方官员能否向当地群众负责这个极其重要的问题。
　　北京大学中国经济研究中心主任姚洋则更加直接深入地触及问题的核心。
　　他写道，中国改革取得成功的关键在于共产党没有牺牲大部分人利益而让政策被特殊利益集团劫持（即使政策对人民整体而言仍具有“掠夺性”）。不过，随着很多官员融入权贵资本主义世界，情况正在改变。
　　“尽管私人企业意识到为了更大的利润应加强与政府的关系，但政府、其盟友及政府控制的国有企业正在迅速形成强大、排他的利益集团。”姚洋写道。
　　“所有这些表明，要想制衡强大、排他的利益集团，必须形成明确的政治转型模式。”他说。
　　“**必须尽快认识到，如果想继续维持高经济增长并促进社会稳定，除全面民主化以外，别无他法。”

英文原文：
China's challenge
July 13, 2010
John Garnaut
There is no alternative to fuller democratisation if China wishes to maintain high economic growth and social stability.
AUSTRALIA'S export prices remain about as good as they have been in a century, but the peak of that boom is now behind us. What we've seen in the past few years is as good as it will get.

Last week alone iron ore spot prices fell 9.4 per cent and Brazil-China freight prices plunged 20 per cent. China's trade figures showed iron ore imports slumped 14 per cent in June (measured year-on-year), after rising an average 8.4 per cent each month until May.
Given that China bought 70 per cent of the world's iron ore exports last year, and Australia's iron ore exports this year will be worth about $US50 billion, it's not hard to see that the huge Chinese tailwind for Australia's national income is no longer blowing like it was. China's coal, aluminium and copper imports also fell in June.
Advertisement: Story continues belowThe underlying reason for Australia's once-in-a century resources boom was that China's heavy industry sector has been growing much faster than its overall economy.
In my view, this boom was inflated by distortions in the Chinese economy that are linked to China's hybrid form of market-authoritarian government.
The point now is that a series of command-economy edicts has flipped this pattern around. Steel production has been falling in absolute terms for two months now and the rate of this fall accelerated during June. That was despite a one-off surge in steel exports as mills pocketed export rebates before they are scrapped today.
Over the coming decade the trend in Chinese resource consumption - and therefore Australian national income - will be determined partly by consumer and investor preferences. Will China's per capita automobile use increase 20-fold, to match the United States? And is that ecologically possible?
But the aggregate of those private choices will be trammelled by policy and political choices that the Chinese leadership will either face or evade. Many of those challenges will be outlined today by a series of leading economists at Australian National University's China Update conference:
Zhao Zhongxiang will be looking at China's serious efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Last year China installed more wind power turbines than any other nation. And yet, in the first quarter of this year, 60 per cent of wind power generation capacity was wasted because it wasn't hooked up to the grid.
Huang Yiping will be looking at price distortions that fed China's heavy industry boom including cheap industrial land, cheap energy and cheap capital.
Cai Fang will analyse the "hukou" policies that treat migrant labourers as second-class citizens in their adopted cities, sharply restricting the rate of urbanisation, and how the government is now loosening those restrictions.
Hugh McKay and Song Ligang will calculate how China's per capita steel consumption could peak earlier and at a higher rate than previously assumed - at double the current rate of consumption in little more than a decade.
However, even these crucial trends and policy debates will be swamped in coming years by the core question of whether and how a one-party state can make itself accountable.
Over-construction will continue as long as officials receive great financial incentives and few political and legal disincentives against pocketing bribes and stealing peasant land.
State-dominated heavy industry will continue to over-produce as long as the services sector is stunted by politically powerful state monopolies.
And the whole over-built edifice risks coming down if mechanisms are not developed to resolve rather than suppress political grievances.
That's why Zhang Yongsheng, at the State Council's Development Research Centre, today will tackle the huge question of whether local officials can ever be held accountable to their people when they are appointed from above and are reliant on the central government for their revenue.
And Yao Yang, director of Peking University's prestigious China Centre for Economic Research, goes even more directly to the heart of things.
He writes that the key to China's reform-era success is that the party has not allowed policy to be hijacked by special interest groups at the expense of other sectors of the population (even if it remained ''predatory'' towards the people as a whole!). But that is now changing, as cadres meld seamlessly into the world of crony capitalism.
"While the private business community is realising the importance of cultivating the government for larger profits, it is the government itself, its cronies and government-controlled SOEs [state-owned enterprises] that are quickly forming strong and exclusive interest groups," writes Yao.
"All this suggests that some form of explicit political transition will be necessary to counterbalance the formation of strong and exclusive interest groups," he says.
"The Chinese Communist Party must soon realise that there is no alternative to fuller democratisation if it wishes to maintain both high economic growth and enhance social stability."
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