Far from implying stagnation, 'new normal' means that many more changes are on the way

One reason why so many people are wary about where China is heading today is that many things its leaders have planned and promised have failed to materialize - at least not so far.

Anyone who is aware of the road China has traveled since the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to get to where it is today may feel that when they compare these days with those there are strong similarities. Both were times when people yearned for rapid change, but when it did come it was a bit messier than most had expected.

Just think about how little of a market economy there was then, when its driving philosophy - to let supply and demand determine prices - was allowed to apply only to grocery stores. And just think how strong the bureaucratic economy was, when state-owned enterprise directors complained that they lacked the power to build a new toilet for their workers, and had to wait for approval from heaven knows how many "relevant authorities".

Attempted reform was seen by some onlookers, outside China as well as inside, as a waste of time and energy, trying to reconcile two irreconcilable forces, centralized government and a market economy. They saw it as, at most, a daring social experiment, as risky as any of the nation's previous ones.

Shenzhen, the largest special economic zone in the 1990s, was famous not for companies such as Tencent and Huawei, but for its sex industry.

Lujiazui, which has become the new flashy financial district of Shanghai, consisted mostly of rundown factories and vegetable fields. Because of the city's stagnant ways, locals called it a "dead crab".

I remember sitting at a high-level economics symposium in 1991 listening to a silver-haired professor from one of the most highly regarded universities in the country giving a one-hour speech on just one point: How difficult it might be, theoretically and in practice, to introduce a market economy in China.

It was amazing, in retrospect, that such a huge change did happen when so many people held so many divergent views about possible changes, and when there were many who did not seem to nurse any expectations about change at all.

However, in a large country, once an idea takes hold, it can eventually have millions of people in its sway, driving change like an unstoppable force.

One of the most contemporary examples of this is mobile communications, the smartphone in particular. Of course, a phone remains exactly what it has always been - a phone - but now there are a multitude of dimensions to it, as more than 600 million people in China can attest. Many of today's new multimillion-dollar companies have been practically built on the phone, even as that same device has left many older companies, including telecommunications service providers, floundering, because they have failed to provide more value-added services.

Now more and more banks are learning to compete with small Web-based platforms to match small lenders with borrowers. It is clear that banking will follow retail to soon become an online industry.

In Beijing, a just-unveiled program called Made in China 2025 is aimed at upgrading the country's industry. Ten focus areas have been chosen, information technology being the first of them.

This is followed by: high-end numerical control machines and automation; aerospace and aviation equipment; maritime engineering equipment and high-tech vessel manufacturing; advanced rail equipment; energy-saving vehicles; electric power equipment; new (meaning composite) materials; biomedicine high-performance apparatuses; and equipment for industrialized agriculture.

That list may look very dry, and, as with any government program, it is difficult to say in which direction the work in these areas may head and its degree of success. But if one thinks of them in the context of a country of 1.3 billion people dissatisfied with the status quo and yearning for more change, one can only imagine a very different China 10 or 20 years from now. For one thing, it will not just be retail and banking for which the mobile Internet has become an integral part.

Only by looking at things this way, from such a historical perspective, can one really appreciate that China's so-called new normal marks neither a dead standstill, a short pause or a sharp turn, but a long-term process in which many small opportunities will evolve and add to one another and eventually create yet another unstoppable force.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact the writer at edzhang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 03/27/2015 page13)