HOW INTERESTING TO see President Hu Jintao stress to the National People's Congress that China will remain on the socialist path. I noticed this and then ran out of fingers long before I could tally up the number of references to a market economy in the eight-page lift-out we published on the NPC yesterday.
It seems to me, Mr Hu, that your colleagues are doing their level best to walk that socialist path in reverse, although I am not sure that they themselves really know where it is leading them now.
Take, for instance, Premier Wen Jiabao's preferred route of proactive fiscal spending, which he linked, among other things, to bringing down unemployment.
Proactive fiscal spending already produced a fiscal deficit last year of more than 300 billion yuan (about HK$281.64 billion), the equivalent of more than 3 per cent of gross domestic product, and this is right on the borderline of what the World Bank considers danger territory.
You may argue of course that deficit spending of this kind may be justified as a stimulus to an economy which has gone into recession. True, but a government that claims 8 per cent economic growth hardly has this justification to hand.
And unemployment is hardly the most pressing problem the mainland faces. As the chart shows, the unemployment rate has risen in recent years but this has been a phenomenon around the world recently. The mainland's unemployment rate is in any case still less than the weighted average of Asian countries and has certainly long been less than that of developed countries such as the United States.
