Wen's remarks prime speculators for run-up to the leap forward

IMAGINE YOURSELF WALKING across a field when you suddenly find a deep ditch crossing your path, let us say one of about five feet in width.

You now have a choice. Your gradualist approach towards crossing that field - ambling along - has served perfectly well so far and will serve once again when you get to the other side of that ditch - but it will not serve you in getting across the ditch.

Keep walking as you were before and you will fall in. The only way to cross the ditch is to step back a few paces, make a brief run and jump across it.

There are times in matters of economic reform when the same is true, when gradualist reform can only take you so far before you have a big jump to make. Either the market that you have toyed with opening is opened or it is kept closed. There are no intermediate stages left.

The Soviet Union, for instance, faced that choice in 1991. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev introduced gradualist reforms that then began to snowball of their own accord into greater reforms and, suddenly, the big decision could no longer be avoided: crawl back the way the nation had come or jump forward. The people jumped, the Soviet Union expired and a market economy was born. It took a leap to go into communism. It took a leap to come back out.

The mainland, following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, made that first sort of leap in 1949, when it adopted a command economy. It is now also turning around to face the leap again on a return to a market economy and, just as before, there will be no easy way across the big divide. When the gradualist approach has taken you as far as it can, you jump or fall.

Where that jump is most likely to be made in the mainland is over the big divide of the capital account. If an eventual full opening of the capital account is to mean that the man on the street in Chengdu can freely direct his bank to convert his yuan savings into US dollars and buy shares of Motorola with it, then the days of central control over the mainland economy are over. The money can go where it wants and will no longer be dictated to.