China Emerging_ 1978-2008 - Xiao-bo , Wu [43]
College graduates at the Shenzhen Job Fair in 1997. From this year onward, the government no longer assigned students to a position. Society created positions and students applied for jobs themselves.
However, from around the mid1990s onward, the collective-enterprise model began to be infected with many of the ills of the stateowned enterprises. This was mainly because ownership was not clearly delineated. One official openly described the problems in a speech. “The ownership structure (of collectively held township and village enterprises) is too uniform; the division of responsibilities between the government and the enterprises is unclear; the ownership of enterprise assets is not specified; and the previous vitality of these entities has greatly diminished. Essentially, collectively owned township and village enterprises have turned into the same thing as the old system.
October 23, 1997, three months after Hong Kong is returned to China, the stock market plunges by 1211 points, and all newspaper headlines scream, “Stock market crashes.”
In 1996, cell phones were considered luxury items, but soon their status dropped as everyone began using them. Even a vegetable seller had one in her pocket.
A horse cart juxtaposed against a truck and a plane that is just about to land. Photographed in 1997.
A fashion show on the Golden Bridge in front of the Tiananmen Gate, in 1986.
A fashion show in 1994.
A fashion show.
What’s worse, many local leaders are holding onto the model. They are actively preventing the nonpublic form of economic structure from developing.”
This speech was considered as an official collective reflection on the Su-nan model.The“policyhalo”that had once surrounded the Su-nan model now began to dissipate. By the end of 2002, by undergoing all kinds of reforms,90%oftownshipand village enterprises in southern Jiangsu had been turned into privately operated enterprises. This marked the end of a long trajectory that had begun with the People’s Cooperative system in the 1950s and extended to the People’s Commune System. A market-driven enterprise system that was characterized by concrete ownership rights was finally becoming mainstream.
OnSeptember12,1997, at the Fifteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing, Jiang Ze-min, the General Secretary, made a major revision in the theoretical underpinning of the traditional system of public ownership. He raised the concept of a “mixed-ownership” system. Not only that, he also indicated that the non-publicly owned part of the economy was already not just “supplementary,” but was in fact “an important component.” He emphasized that the state-owned portion of the economy was declining, but this would not overly influence the nature of socialism. Moreover, he declared an end to the debate on whether or not state-operated enterprises would carry out the asset-ownership reform.
This statement by Jiang Ze-min and the proceedings of the Fifteenth Congress were seen as the start of the third great mental emancipation in China. In 1998, a very influential book was published in China that described this third mental emancipation as well as the first two. It was written by the highly respected author, Ling Zhi-jun, and the editorial writer of the People’s Daily, Ma Li-cheng. It was titled Crossing Swords: A Record of the Three Mental Emancipation Campaigns in Modern China. The first “sword fight” had taken place in 1978 and was about the standards for judging truth. The second occurred in 1992 about whether the reform process should be called “capitalist” or “socialist.” This was now the third emancipation, the start of which was signified by the opening of the Fifteenth Congress.
Now that the “thinking” had been clarified, the government began to wield a sharp knife. It began the process of “holding onto the big ones and letting the little ones go.” Not unexpectedly, in actual implementation, the thinking began to take more proverbial twists and turns. Before this, the idea of “holding onto the big ones” had been to