Why China Works

Even more farsighted is the new, landmark land-reform program, which would make it possible for Chinese peasants to rent or lease their land to outsiders (including corporations). Simply figuring out who owns which properties can be a Byzantine task in China, so land reform could take decades—but the idea is already generating excitement. In November, real-estate consulting firm Jones Lang LaSalle estimated that land reform could unlock rural property worth as much as $2.5 trillion. "Land reform will be Hu Jintao's lasting legacy," says JLL national research director Michael Klibaner. Turning peasants into land-owning consumers could go a long way toward creating a consumer society, reducing China's dependence on exports, and rebalancing the world economy.

Once Chinese leaders signal a new direction, they rarely waver, says Rothman. Witness the political battle over American charges that China is deliberately holding down the value of the yuan to boost its exports, a charge that ignores the gradual 21.5 percent rise in the yuan that had already taken place between the summer of 2005 and 2008. While the yuan did fall a bit in recent months, most economists believe Beijing will continue to allow a modest appreciation, weighing its need for export competitiveness against the world's need for more balanced trade flows.

This balance between free and managed markets can also be seen in China's approach to price fixing and state control in key sectors like financial services, telecoms, utilities and energy. Some of these industries are partially privatized—in telecoms, equipment markets are open to foreigners, because they bring capital and expertise that eventually trickles down to local firms, like the now internationally competitive Huawei. But the more lucrative services market is still run by authorities, who set prices on mobile-phone calls. "China does control prices, it's true," says Fang. "But it moves one step behind the market. The market is always the baseline."

Recently, for example, China has been cutting fuel subsidies to bring prices closer to international norms. It's part of a 15-year process, that, according to CLSA's Rothman, has taken the percentage of total consumer prices fixed by the state from 95 percent to as low as 5 percent. The slow easing was designed to avoid the 1,000 percent burst of inflation that hit Russia from 1991 to 1992 after Moscow deregulated prices. "The Chinese don't want shock therapy, which has proven to be all shock, and no therapy," says Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute.

The leadership's faith in its own ability to mold markets may derive from the fact that most are engineers, trained to build from a plan. Eight out of the nine top party officials come from engineering backgrounds, and the practicality of their profession may also help explain why they didn't buy into risky and Western financial innovation. At a recent Chinese business conference in Barcelona, Xu Kuangdi, vice chairman of the advisory body to China's Parliament, and President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, mocked the "virtual" products sold over the last decade by Western bankers: "They had Ph.D.s in physics inventing tools that the banks themselves couldn't understand or regulate. Investors listened to their stories and were told how wonderful all this would be, how much better it was than producing real goods. Everyone was working in a dream."

A command-and-control system run by relatively skilled technocrats allows China to get things done, quickly. "I'm always struck by the ability of the Chinese state to move in a coherent manner and to marshal its people and the resources of the country to a common target," noted David Murphy, head of CLSA's China Reality research division, in a recent report on the country's efforts to bolster growth. Contrast this to Russia, where thuggish autocracy has created an "anything goes" environment in which neither investors nor most officials have any idea what might happen from one moment to the next.

The ruling engineers preside over a system that is highly process-oriented and obsessed with performance metrics. One economist who works closely with top government officials notes that many of them serve the same brand of Chateau Lafite Bordeaux at their dinner parties because of its exceptional rating by the Wine Spectator's Robert Parker. Ambassador Wu Jianmin of the Chinese foreign ministry recalls a recent meeting with a deputy mayor from the city of Wuxi who could compare in detail his own local economy with that of the United States in the 1970s. The official was concerned about why his service sector hadn't grown larger, given the respective per capita income growth (the town's party secretary has since been dispatched to America to hunt for service-sector talent).

Leaders who don't meet internal performance standards are, more often than not, held accountable, and do get sacked, which is still unusual in many developing economies. For instance, the scandal in which at least six Chinese kids died and 300,000 fell ill from toxic milk mixed with melamine to give a falsely high protein level led to the swift sacking in September of six city officials—including the mayor and party secretary—in the hometown of milk-powder maker Sanlu. China's top food safety inspector also stepped down and the company's chairwoman has gone to trial. Such moves seldom fully satisfy public anger but they do rattle officials.

Clear performance targets are part of an efficiency ethos that the Chinese also tend to admire in Americans. Four out of five high-ranking officials now train for some period of time at major universities in the United States (the Kennedy School at Harvard has been nicknamed "the fourth Communist Party school"). What the Chinese people still want at this stage is prosperity, and stability, which they are pursuing with a pragmatic, capitalist zeal that arguably surpasses even that of Americans. Huang Ming, who teaches at both Cornell in New York and the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, jokes that while he can command respect in the United States simply by telling people he's a tenured professor at an Ivy League university, Chinese people say, "OK, that's good, but how much money do you make?"