What does ‘opening up’ exhibition giving credit to SOEs and Xi Jinping say to China’s private firms?
- Deng Xiaoping, who began reforms that transformed the economy, marginalised in displays marking their 40th anniversary
- Beijing continues to send mixed messages about support for ailing private sector, which contributed two-thirds of China’s growth last year
State-owned enterprises are much more prominent than the private sector and President Xi Jinping far more visible than Deng Xiaoping in a special exhibition marking 40 years since China’s reform and opening up, stressing the Communist Party’s role in the economy even as Xi courts private firms to help stabilise growth during the trade war with the United States.
The exhibition, at the National Museum of China in Beijing, devotes half of a display about Chinese leaders to the achievements of Xi, who took office in 2012 yet receives more emphasis than former paramount leader Deng – under whom China began its economic transformation in 1978 – and his successors.
Zhu Rongji, the former premier who engineered China joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001, is nowhere to be seen.
Shanghai-based political analyst Chen Daoyin said the show’s focus on the present leadership was intended to deliver a strong message that China had entered a new era, signalling an end to the “old China” led by Deng’s ideas.
“[Last year] the 19th National Congress declared that China has entered a new era – that is, the era of Xi,” said Chen. “As such, the symbolic significance of the exhibition is that Deng Xiaoping’s era has come to an end, and China is moving forward and has entered a new world: the era of Xi.”
That the exhibition deifies the current leadership and diminishes the impact of former reformers such as Deng is also an attempt to revise history, said Zhang Lifan, a prominent scholar of modern Chinese history in Beijing.
The economic contribution of the private sector – which accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s growth and nearly 90 per cent of its new urban jobs in 2017 – was acknowledged at the show, but the number of displays about private firms was dwarfed by that for state-owned enterprises (SOEs).