China’s economic policymakers have to learn to let go if they want to establish credibility

Yasheng Huang says officials have acted with exuberant irrationality in their desire to retain control, revealing a troubling lack of understanding about the realities of market economies

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Published: 5:39pm, 20 Jan 2016Updated: 5:39pm, 20 Jan 2016

All the evidence shows the stock market bull run was engineered by the government.

The ability of the Chinese government to control is undisputed and unparalleled compared with governments in other countries and, indeed, compared with the Chinese state during imperial times. If the stock market does not go up, then prevent it from going down by shutting it down. If too many investors want to cash out their positions at the same time, just charge them with “malicious intent to sell” and arrest them as proverbial chickens to scare off the monkeys.

An investor at a stock trading hall in Huaibei, Anhui province. It is amazing that a government in charge of the world’s second-largest economy apparently failed to anticipate that a market burdened with negative fundamentals would have to come down. Photo: Xinhua

The problem is that a government so focused on and obsessed with controls is not one that cares about or is particularly good at establishing credibility. A government needs credibility when it tries to convince others to do its bidding without the ability to dictate actions directly.

In his book, The Courage to Act, Ben Bernanke wrote about how US Federal Reserve officials debated and deliberated long and hard about particular words and phrases, and even about the usage of different punctuation marks, in their communiqués with the public.

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. If the Fed lost the confidence of the market, much of its influence and leverage would evaporate. Photo: AFP

The reason is that the effectiveness of the Fed does not depend on its ability to arrest people at will but on how it is perceived by market participants – whether it is perceived as being capable, deliberative and above all credible. If the Fed lost the confidence of the market, much of its influence and leverage would evaporate.

The most worrying sign is that Chinese economic policymaking seems to be completely divorced from the realities of a market economy

The most worrying sign out of China is not that its GDP growth has slowed to 6.9 per cent. The most worrying sign is that Chinese economic policymaking seems to be completely divorced from the realities of a market economy. In a market economy, policymakers need to think about credibility and should only choose to do those things that have a reasonable chance of success. They should also take into account not just their actions but also reactions to their actions.

By these criteria, economic policymakers in China have fallen far short. Many focus on the stock market turmoil last August and earlier this year but, to me, the most troubling illustration is the market bull run that began in the autumn of 2014. By June 2015, the Shanghai Composite Index had more than doubled within a year. The puzzle is not why the stock markets in China have crashed but why they rose so far and so fast in the first place.