Opinion | China’s ‘opening up’ policy risks becoming an empty promise without going beyond simple business deals
- The ‘reform and opening up’ started under Deng Xiaoping was about both economic and spiritual liberalisation, but policy regression could derail those efforts
- China needs a greater understanding of the outside world, domestic goals for further opening up, and to instil trust in the international community
The phrase “opening up” has rich implications in China. Its original meaning was about Deng Xiaoping’s policy of welcoming foreign investment and technology, but it also has a strong ideological undertone of accepting new ideas.
Economic liberalisation and tolerance of new views have been mutually reinforcing over the past few decades, pushing forward China’s development, and it is hard to say which is more important. To some extent, China’s economic growth in the last four decades would not have been possible without “thought emancipation”.
Yet the role of this “spiritual” opening up has been downplayed in recent years, making the continuation of Deng’s policy shift a shell of its former self.
While Beijing has sought to make it clear that China is still open to trade and investment, it is debatable whether the country remains open to new ideas and divergent views, particularly those that do not follow the official line. As China seeks to remain embedded in the globalised economic system, it is worth noting the three key concepts that originally underpinned the country’s opening-up policy.
The first precondition of this policy is a realistic understanding of the outside world, and of capitalism in particular. China must see sufficient “goodness” in the outside world to justify opening up.
When Deng decided to implement this policy, he was ditching the Cultural Revolution-era myth that “the capitalist world is rotting day by day”. Had China continued to see capitalist countries as evil, decadent and menacing, it would have meant keeping its doors closed indefinitely. Nowadays, China certainly faces a complicated and challenging geopolitical environment, but it would be unwise to paint the outside world as full of “foreign hostile forces”.
Another precondition was that the country must open up in ways that foster domestic change. The new policy was never just about money or commodity trading. From the beginning, China sought to “promote reform through opening up” – two sides of the same coin.
