Can President Xi Jinping succeed in ‘China’s Hawaii’ where Deng Xiaoping failed?
Amid a growing trade dispute with the US, Xi will be keen to use the Boao Forum for Asia to reassure the world that China remains open for business
Hainan, a southern island known as China’s Hawaii, is about to get another chance at becoming a testing ground for the country’s economic liberalisation as Beijing tries hard to paint itself as a promoter of free trade and globalisation.
At the annual Boao Forum for Asia, which opens on Sunday at a beach and golf resort town on the island’s east coast, Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely to announce plans for new free-trade ports with greater autonomy, economic freedom and market access, and Hainan could be among the locations chosen, sources told the South China Morning Post.
“It will be Xi’s own ‘southern tour’,” a government researcher said, referring to the famous trip made by China’s former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992.
During that tour, which came as Beijing was being shunned by liberal democracies after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, Deng sent a strong message that China would continue to liberalise its markets and integrate with the global economy. It worked. After the tour, China’s economic boom, which had started in the early 1980s, was rekindled.
Xi, who is now the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is keen for any future expansion of the world’s second-largest economy to be high quality rather than high speed.