The party urges hard work and studying Xi Jinping thought to navigate the slowdown.
By Anna Fifield Anna Fifield Beijing bureau chief. Email Bio Follow March 5 at 8:08 AM BEIJING — The setting for the Chinese Communist Party’s annual confabs this year, when the party will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic, could hardly have been more inauspicious.
“China faced a complicated and challenging domestic and international environment of a kind rarely seen in many years, and its economy came under new downward pressure,” Premier Li Keqiang told the 2,948 deputies from around the country who had gathered in the Great Hall of the People, the majestic ceremonial building that runs along one side of Tiananmen Square.
Li said it would be a “tough struggle” to get to the government’s forecast growth of between 6 and 6.5 percent this year — down slightly from the 6.6 percent recorded last year.That growth rate might look rosy for developed countries, but for China, it’s a far cry from the stimulus-fueled 12 percent recorded at the beginning of 2010.
“If you’re under 45, you’ve only ever known a rising China,” said Randal Phillips, a former CIA station chief in Beijing who now leads the Mintz Group consultancy practice in Asia. “You’ve always known that next year is going to be better than last year. That’s not true anymore. There are now strains in the economy.”A measure of factory activity, the Purchasing Manager’s Index, has fallen to its weakest level in three years, while cellphone shipments were down 13 percent in January.
The Communist Party, which studied the collapse of the Soviet Union and has been keeping a close watch on the situation in Venezuela, is on high alert for any signs of unhappiness. The party is well aware of communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s famous saying: A single spark can start a prairie fire.Fortunately for the party, Xi’s efforts over the past six years at increasing security controls have proved very effective at putting out sparks.
“They have since built up paramilitary police forces so they don’t have to rely on the army,” McGregor said. “They have also learned, through a mixture of bribery and soft coercion, to disperse or defuse protests before they get too big and out of hand.”
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