從中央經濟工作會議看2025年中國經濟著力點

《新華社》2024-12-13

中央經濟工作會議12月11日至12日在北京舉行。習近平總書記出席會議併發表重要講話，總結2024年經濟工作，分析當前經濟形勢，部署2025年經濟工作，為中國經濟高質量發展把舵定向。

堅定信心不斷深化對經濟工作的規律性認識

中央經濟會議在北京舉行

提高財政赤字率，增加發行超長期特別國債，增加地方政府專項債券發行使用

《澎湃新聞》2024-12-12

原文由中國問題專家劉博士和經濟學家史泰爾博士共同執筆(。以下略抒讀後感想。

中國「零容忍」政策的功能性，和中國政府就該政策改弦易轍的變通性當然可以評論；但在我看來，原文「開場白」的第一段明顯表現出兩位作者相當偏頗。從而，不得不讓我對她/他們以下分析/評論「就事論事」或「依理說理」的程度提高警覺。

接下來的兩段呈現的仍然是「主見」多於「事實」。

第四段則與事實不符。中國早在2020就提出「雙循環規劃」；此規劃的重點正是「基於國內消費的成長」。2023年只是再度宣示和繼續強調此政策。

第五段提出經濟發展過程中「中等收入困境」這個一般性現實，可參考。

兩位作者在第六段又回到她/他們「主見」多於「事實」的困境。的確，直到20世紀後期，中國人民的儲蓄行為很強；但「儲蓄行為」並非由基因主導，它不屬於俗稱的「民族性」。「儲蓄行為」由「社會建構」過程而來，它是一種「社會習慣」。我們可以從韋伯的「新教倫理觀」來了解；也可以從馬克思的「『社會存在』決定『意識』論」來了解。抓住過去中國老百姓的「儲蓄行為」來討論21世紀的中國社會走向，兩位作者難免缺乏「歷史感」及社會學素養之譏。此處可參看《中國經濟之狀況篇》一欄中《中國經濟成長下半年度可望回升》一文。順帶一提：如果使用中國「傳宗接代」的倫理觀來理解中國目前生育率偏低這個現象，勢必落個牛頭不對馬嘴。

正文第一節《優先順位的衝突》列舉了許多中國經濟發展中相互衝突的勢力，以及隨之而來在政策上的困局，可參考。它們是否到位或切中要害，則非我有有能力置喙。

正文第二節討論中國老百姓的「儲蓄行為」；請見以上相關討論。

正文第三節討論「消費衰退」；請見以上引用的《中國經濟成長下半年度可望回升》一文。

如果各位覺得以下正文過於冗常，本欄轉貼《財經內幕》上的《不再依賴投資：中國經濟復甦注定失敗》一文為以下原文「精華版」。

任淑莉女士此文分析中國經濟當下面對的困境以及復甦之道。

前者為：政府過去的政策和措施導致投資者裹足不前。
後者為：政府改變角色，從管理者與調控者轉換為買家和投資者。

這味藥不過是「政府撒錢」的老偏方、舊戲碼。現在是否管用還真難說。我不是財經專業人士，以下只根據看過豬走路的常識略表淺見。

1)  投資回收效益議題：「報酬遞減律」應該是經濟學最早被發現的硬道理之一。例如，10年或20年前，進行基礎建設(蓋機場、修高速公路等等)除了擴大就業和帶動景氣外，還有增加諸如運輸效能的價值(貨暢其流)。但基礎建設有一定的飽和值或臨界點，超過這個飽和值的基礎建設就成了蚊子館、蚊子公路、和蚊子機場。
2)  後續發展議題：這是上個議題的延伸。俗話說，「錢要用在刀口上」。如果政府撒了錢只能維持短期的就業和景氣，主事者必須三思。理論上，政府要規劃「公共支出」，這筆預算的對象應該以建立一個可持續發展的產業為優先；例如當年台灣政府扶植「半導體產業」。又例如南韓政府當年扶植「服裝設計產業」。
3)  財政健康議題：「撒錢」是銅板的一面；這個銅板另一面刻著的是「透支」。帳總有結算的一天，只是遲早問題。債務危機先引爆？經濟停滯先搞垮政府？恐怕不是那個精算師或政治領袖敢打包票。

從而，任女士大作的標題不無浮誇之嫌。

索引：

deleveraging – 降低資產負債比

本文為本欄《習近平的中國經濟計劃注定失敗》原文的「袖珍版」。請參看我對該文的評介。

China's economic recovery is 'doomed to fail' as Beijing shifts away from investment, think tank experts say

Jennifer So, 《財經內幕》，06/30/23

China's economic recovery is practically doomed, experts from the Council of Foreign Relations said in an op-ed.

*  The Chinese government has launched a plan for consumption-led growth, meaning the nation will shift away from investment.
*  But that's likely to ispark intense backlash, experts warned.

China's economic recovery is doomed, as President Xi Jinping will likely abandon his plan to shift the economy away from its reliance on investment, according to think tank experts.

In a op-ed for Foreign Affairs published Thursday, Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Benn Steil, the director of international economics at the New York-based think-tank, pointed to Xi's overarching plan for China's economy as the nation reopens and dials back its zero-COVID policies.

Late last year, the Chinese government announced an ambitious 12-year plan that involves expanding household consumption to drive the economy, shifting away from investment over the long term.

That plan was met with an outpouring of praise from some economists, as China's household spending accounts for just 38% of its GDP, well below the global average of 68%. Meanwhile, 43% of China's economy is driven by investment – about double the US's long-run average of 22%.

"Sensible though it is, consumption-led growth in Xi's China is doomed fo fail. As Xi has done so often in the past, he will back away from the policy once the inevitable backlash from powerful constituencies, including state-owned enterprises, local governments, and the national security bureaucracy, takes hold," Liu and Steil said.

Beijing already appears to be going back to its old playbook to boost growth, which will land China in more debt, they added.

Officials have stepped in to prop up key sectors of its economy, and are unlikely to depend on households to ramp up spending in those areas, Liu and Steil said.

Xi’s Plan for China’s Economy Is Doomed to Fail

“Consumption-Led Growth” Is Good Policy but Bad Politics

Zongyuan Zoe Liu and Benn Steil, 《外交事務》，06/29/23

A staple of governance under Chinese President Xi Jinping is that major policies are introduced with great fanfare only to be abruptly discarded, often without even acknowledging their prior existence. China’s breakneck shift from three years of “zero COVID” policy to zero policy on COVID, following a wave of protests in late 2022, is only the most conspicuous of these reversals, all of which can be ascribed to their role in undermining the credibility of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader.

Xi’s prized policy of “common prosperity” was similarly short-lived. After prematurely declaring victory over the pandemic in May 2020, Xi embraced common prosperity as the mantra behind which to rally the economy while making society fairer and more equal. The government launched high-profile antimonopoly and antitrust probes to curb the reach of Big Tech and to assert greater control over the content and distribution of the fruits of innovation. Hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market capitalization vaporized, crushing ventures that elevated meeting private wants over tracking party ideology. At the autumn 2021 CCP meetings, a historic resolution situating Xi beside Mao Zedong in the pantheon of Chinese rulers invoked “common prosperity” eight times.

Yet by the middle of 2022, with the notoriously unproductive state sector in the ascendant, more powerful than it had been in decades, but with the recovery failing, official references to common prosperity all but disappeared. A 17,000-word report on the economy presented at the National People’s Congress by Premier Li Keqiang in March 2022 mentioned common prosperity just once. Two months later, Xi and his top economic adviser, Liu He, reversed course entirely, issuing a series of broad statements supportive of private tech initiatives, cheering the stock market. By December, zero COVID and common prosperity had both been interred in the graveyard of policy dogmas.

But a great leader needs a great policy, and in Xi’s China there is always a new one. In December 2022, the government announced the less flashy but more reassuring “consumption-led growth”—the centerpiece policy of an ambitious new 12-year economic plan. For the first time in modern Chinese history, the country’s planners would prioritize “expanding household consumption” over “effective investment” as a long-term strategy. In practical terms, China’s growth would now be driven mainly by household spending decisions and not by the state directing or subsidizing companies to build and produce according to diktat.

Almost universally, economists have praised consumption-led growth. Indeed, if carried out properly, this policy shift would help China avoid the dreaded middle-income trap—a phenomenon in which declining productivity and falling investment returns in developing nations lead to stagnating living standards.

Sensible though it is, consumption-led growth in Xi’s China is doomed to fail. As Xi has done so often in the past, he will back away from the policy once the inevitable backlash from powerful constituencies, including state-owned enterprises, local governments, and the national security bureaucracy, takes hold. The Chinese people, knowing that the leader will bury the initiative at the first signs of worry from the party, will be reluctant to embrace it. Instead, they will hunker down, saving—in a country with the highest savings rate on earth—yet more of their meager earnings for the expected hard times ahead.

CLASHING PRIORITIES

Consumption-led growth aims to fix a very real problem. China’s household spending accounts for a mere 38 percent of gross domestic product—nearly 30 percentage points below the global average. Investment accounts for a whopping 43 percent of China’s GDP, and under Xi the economy has become increasingly dependent on state spending in sectors he deems “strategic.” To fuel this investment, the government constrains the share of GDP that accrues to households and boosts the share that goes to preferred businesses and sectors. It does so through a raft of seemingly unrelated policies, such as pushing down the exchange rate to reduce net imports, making tax rates regressive, keeping social safety nets weak, curbing the rights of urban migrants, banning unions outside the party-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions, forgoing dividends at state-owned enterprises, and capping bank deposit rates.

Because Chinese lenders pay depositors far less than they would in a competitive market, they are able to lend to state-owned and state-favored enterprises at below-market rates. These companies are then shielded from default by policies and interventions that preclude or forestall bankruptcy. In the stock market, government authorities block disfavored sectors from accessing investor capital (using published “red lights”) or warn investors away from such sectors (using “yellow lights”). They also impose arbitrary “rectification” orders on products and services—ranging from fintech to gaming—the consumption of which is deemed to clash with the “maintenance of social order.” The online retailer Alibaba was subjected to such orders, requiring it to change and report regularly on its business practices, after its CEO, Jack Ma, publicly criticized China’s regulatory regime in October 2020.

The most conspicuous result of state-directed investment has been gross overbuilding in housing and infrastructure, accompanied by relentlessly declining productivity and soaring debt levels across the economy. In the short term (which can endure for many years), a country can always increase GDP merely by digging ditches and filling them back in. But eventually, default or inflation is necessary to extinguish the debt, and the finance for ditch digging dries up.

With a new policy regime aimed at boosting private consumption levels, however, one can expect major positive developments. Speculation in real estate, which has wreaked havoc on the economy and which Xi has condemned, will abate. Wages and living standards among the broad base of Chinese citizens will rise. Spending and investment will flow to the more productive economic sectors, particularly services, which are dominated by private firms—rather than politically fostered state-owned ones. Investment returns will increase and the growth of bad debt decline. Imports will rise and the current-account surplus will move toward balance. And finally, economic and political tensions with the world’s market economies will, after years of relentless growth, begin to ease.

China has the highest savings rate on earth.

Yet consumption-led growth will clash with more immediate government economic priorities. First among these is boosting short-term GDP growth. Despite Xi’s condemnations of real estate speculation, he has never allowed GDP numbers—which are juiced by bullish property bets—to be determined by market forces. Consider the way the Chinese housing and corporate loan markets operate. Whereas in the United States home prices and corporate borrowing have historically risen and fallen together with the ups and downs of the business cycle, Beijing has systematically countered falls in home prices by pushing more corporate borrowing and countered falls in corporate borrowing with incentives to boost home buying—all to ensure achievement of the government’s desired GDP.

This time is no different, despite the consumption drive. As the initial signs of post-pandemic recovery have lost steam, Chinese policymakers have reverted to the old playbook of property support measures—on top of the sweeping 16-point rescue package rolled out last November. There is therefore no reason to believe that Xi is willing, now, to leave economic growth and the fortunes of “strategic” sectors to the mercy of consumer whim. Debt levels will, instead, continue to grow, and consumer demand that does not conform to party demand—say, that directed at foreign firms or competitors of state-owned enterprises—will be snuffed out.

There are other reasons for pessimism about consumption-led growth. The political blowback accompanying any significant shift from investment to consumption will be fierce. As more production is devoted to meeting consumer demand, exporters will be hurt. Highly indebted local governments, which through the control and sale of land-use rights have become powerful economic actors in China, will have fewer resources at their disposal as the mammoth Xi-era construction projects cease. Already, many municipalities are failing to meet payrolls and are auctioning off schools and cutting pensions. After years of claiming credit for robust, nationwide, building-bloated urban growth, the central government will not escape the ire of unpaid municipal workers, the businesses catering to them, and the netizens supporting them on social media.

The central government will, meanwhile, under a genuine consumption drive, have far less control over who makes what, in what quantities, and to what end. This reality will collide head-on with new domestic technology promotion schemes and national “security” initiatives aimed at curbing the ability of foreign firms to gather and disseminate market information or to “make a fuss” about government policy on matters ranging from technology to human rights. Indeed, foreign business confidence in China has, notwithstanding the consumption initiative, fallen significantly in the past year. European business confidence in the country has reached a record low.

SPENDING SLUMP

Early signs suggest that Xi’s consumption drive is already failing badly. In March 2023, Chinese exports surged by 14.8 percent and imports declined by 1.4 percent, producing a massive monthly trade surplus of $88.2 billion. These data reflect weak domestic demand and a corresponding need to push goods abroad—the opposite of consumption-led growth. And the government cannot count on a new generation of consumers to rescue its plans. Youth unemployment is running at over 20 percent. It is no surprise that China’s main stock market index is down 20 percent this year. This decline has been accompanied by a steady slump in the prices of copper and iron ore, signaling continued weak demand.

Whereas spring economic numbers showed a much-anticipated post-lockdown bounce back in demand for luxury goods and domestic travel, broader metrics suggest widespread consumer pessimism. Savings, after soaring in 2022, accelerated further after the consumption drive was announced. Yuan bank deposits rose by a remarkable 41 percent in the first quarter of 2023, year-on-year, after reaching a record high $2.6 trillion in 2022. Borrowing plummeted over 50 percent in 2022, reflecting the decline in home sales. Households with excess cash prepaid mortgages instead of buying cars or other discretionary items. According to a quarterly survey by the People’s Bank of China, there has been an enormous rise in the urge to save rather than spend or invest. Fifty-eight percent of Chinese respondents now prefer to save, up from 45.7 percent in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

Weak domestic demand correlates directly with weakened household spending power and deteriorating balance sheets. Between 2008 and 2022, household debt as a percentage of GDP surged from 18 percent to 62 percent. Meanwhile, the slumping property market, which accounts for an enormous 30 percent of China’s GDP (double the share in the United States) is suppressing demand for industrial materials such as steel, timber, and chemicals, as well as consumer durables such as appliances, furniture, and fixtures. At the same time, local governments have seen revenue from state-owned land-use rights, a primary source of public expenditure, plummet 27 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023, further dampening demand.