Adjectival / adverbial insistence: PRC emphatic economics
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Reading PRC articles, they strike me as mostly propagandistic hype and rhetoric, but very little substance. Simon Cox recognizes that in his "China’s inscrutable economic policy","Drum Tower", Eonomist:
F.R. Leavis, an English-literature don, used to complain about something he called “adjectival insistence”. He was thinking of Joseph Conrad, who was a bit too fond of words like inscrutable, implacable and unspeakable. The effect, Leavis said, was not to magnify but to muffle.
Leavis’s complaint came to my mind recently when I was parsing the latest official statements on China’s economic policy for an article about the tasks policymakers face in the year ahead. The country’s rulers have woken up to the fact that the economy needs help. Many businesses lack consumers and consumers lack confidence. Prices are flat or falling.
The obvious remedy is stimulus. But rather than specifying a detailed easing package (as they did in 2008 during the global financial crisis) China’s leaders have offered a multitude of modifiers. They have promised a “moderately” loose monetary policy and a “more” proactive fiscal policy. They have resolved to boost consumption “vigorously” and expand domestic demand “comprehensively”. Chinese, of course, relies on such constructions much more than English. Nonetheless, if Leavis had ever turned his attention to the prose emanating from China’s Politburo, he would have accused it of adverbial insistence.
This communication style presents economists with a problem. How do you quantify words like moderately and vigorously? In March we will be able to put some numbers on the rhetoric. Li Qiang, the prime minister, will announce an official growth target for the year and the Ministry of Finance will unveil its budget. China’s central bank will also have had three months to reveal what level of interest rates (and reserve requirements) counts as moderate looseness. Until then, the leadership’s efforts to revive demand have been muffled, not magnified, by the vague way they have presented them.
Based on this language and other policy signals, economists seem to think the growth target will be the same as this year’s (“around 5%”) although it could be even harder to meet. The fiscal deficit, broadly defined, could increase by up to 2% of GDP. Interest rates might fall by perhaps another 0.4 percentage points over the course of the year.
These estimates are the best we can do until March. The reason we have to wait until then, of course, is because that is when China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, will next gather in full. One of its duties is to pass the budget. It is routinely described as a “rubber-stamp” parliament, because it has never voted against any proposal put before it. Whatever stimulus measures the leadership has in mind will face little parliamentary resistance. China’s rulers have no reason to doubt the legislature’s stamp of approval. But they still, it seems, feel the need to wait for it.
Chinese statesmen and officials are masters of grandiloquence, and that is a tradition that goes back thousands of years, whether Communist or Confucian.
Selected readings
- "Moody's vs. Confucius and Mencius" (12/9/23)
- Xi Jinping's faux classicism" (7/2/23)
[Thanks to Philip Taylor]