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Epoch Times Commentary: China Is Afraid Major Economic Restructuring Would Endanger Communist Regime

The Epoch Times published  a commentary titled, “The U.S. China Trade War: the Reason for the Deadlock and Beijing’s Bottom Line.” The article proposed that what China is most afraid of is a major change in its economic structure because that would endanger the communist regime. The article quoted a number of comments from scholars. Li Ruogu, the former president of the China Export-Import Bank, expressed the belief that this is a serious misunderstanding because many people regard the current Sino-US trade dispute as a pure trade or deficit problem. He said that this dispute is entirely about the direction of China’s development. Huang Yasheng, a professor at the MIT Sloan School, said that the essence of the Sino-US trade dispute is institutional conflict. The only way to resolve an institutional conflict is to accelerate market-oriented reforms and establish a sound legal system.  He stated, “It would be tantamount to abandoning the party’s leadership to business, and to the judicial and legal system.” An Epoch Time commentator believed that Beijing is still playing “order diplomacy.” That is, China can buy more things from the United States; it can even place orders in the hundreds of billions of dollars with the U.S. and it can also lower some tariffs, but it will never agree to “economic restructuring.” If the U.S. really continues to push hard, Beijing might give in. Even if Beijing were to make limited trade concessions in the future, it would do everything possible to delay the implementation of any economic structural reforms.

Source: Epoch Times, June 7, 2018
http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/18/6/7/n10463430.htm