Beijing: At 79, Wu Jinglian is considered China’s most famous economist.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he was an adviser to China’s leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. He helped push through some of this country’s earliest market reforms, paving the way for China’s spectacular rise and earning him the nickname “Market Wu”.
Testing the limits: Wu’s pro-market ideas have influenced a generation of younger economists who now hold senior government posts. Lucas Shcifres / Bloomberg.
Last year, China’s state-controlled media slapped him with a new moniker: spy.
Wu has not been interrogated, charged or imprisoned. But the fact that a state newspaper, The People’s Daily, among others, was allowed to publish Internet rumours alleging that he had been detained on suspicions of being a spy for the US hints that he is annoying some very important people in the government.
He denied the allegations, and soon after they were published, China’s cabinet denied that an investigation was under way.
But in a country that often jails critics, Wu seems to be testing the limits of what Beijing deems permissible. While many economists argue that China’s growth model is flawed, rarely does a prominent Chinese figure, in the government or out, speak with such candour about the flaws he sees in China’s leadership.
Wu—who still holds a research post at an institute affiliated with the State Council, China’s cabinet—has white hair and an amiable face, and he appears frail. But his assessments are often harsh. In books, speeches, interviews and television appearances, he warns that conservative hardliners in the Communist Party have gained influence in the government and are trying to dismantle the market reforms he helped formulate.
He complains that business tycoons and corrupt officials have hijacked the economy and manipulated it for their own ends, a system he calls crony capitalism. He has even called on Beijing to establish a British-style democracy, arguing that political reform is inevitable.
Provocative statements have made him a kind of dissident economist here, and showed the sharp debates behind the scenes, at the highest levels of the Communist Party, about the direction of China’s half-market, half-socialist economy. In many ways, it is a continuation of the debate that has been raging for three decades: What role should the government play in China’s hybrid economy?
Wu says the spy rumours were “dirty tricks” employed by his critics to discredit him.
“I have two enemies,” he said in a recent interview. “The crony capitalists and the Maoists. They will use any means to attack me.”
Nevertheless, some analysts believe that Wu’s critiques are aiding one government faction in a power struggle with another, and that he is protected.
His pro-market ideas have influenced a generation of younger economists who now hold senior government posts, including Zhou Xiaochuan, the leader of China’s central bank, and Lou Jiwei, chairman of the country’s huge sovereign wealth fund.