Commentary: The Jack Ma test for China’s promised shift

BEIJING: This month Liu He, China’s economic tsar, sought to reassure global elites and the heads of some of the world’s biggest companies of two things. First, China is back and open again for business, he said in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos. And second, the Chinese Communist party is more committed than ever before to implementing bold economic and financial reforms.

“Entrepreneurs, both Chinese and foreign, will play an important role as the engine driving China’s historical pursuit of common prosperity,” Liu, a vice-premier and longtime confidante of President Xi Jinping, said. “If wealth doesn’t grow, common prosperity will become a river without source or a tree without roots.”

Liu is clearly correct on his first point. After almost three years of self-imposed isolation to weather the pandemic, Xi’s administration ditched its futile “zero-COVID” policy in early December. The flow of world leaders, business executives and academics that characterised Beijing before the pandemic has resumed. A sharp economic rebound will follow.

As for the vice-premier’s second point, the problem was that it was him saying it and not Xi. Xi’s transformation of party politics has been such that policy pronouncements by anyone other than the president do not carry as much weight as they once did. And even then, what Xi says matters less than what Xi does.