Cities bloom in China’s economic spring
Lessons for Lanka in the transformation of a centrally controlled economy to a social market economy
Tiananmen Square is an economic indicator, said our tour guide as we discussed briefly the global concerns over China’s slowdown. We know economists use consumer price indices, stock market indices, gross domestic product and the strength of the local currency as indicators to judge the economic performance of a country, but a capital’s main square being used as an economic indicator is news to us.
Our tour guy, Mr. Rocky -- that was what he wanted us to call him – has an answer. Mr. Rocky was a ten year-old boy when the Tiananmen Square protests for greater political freedom took place in 1989. He said he grew up with the change that transformed China’s economy from a centrally controlled state economy to the present social market economy.
He said his economic barometer was the crowd strength at Tiananmen Square: The bigger the crowd, the stronger the economy. We were at Tiananmen Square on Sunday August 28 – hours after we arrived in Beijing on a ten-day tour organised by the Chinese embassy for 17 Sri Lankan journalists. The crowd at Tiananmen Square was so overwhelming that Mr. Rocky had to warn us not to lose sight of him. He carried a red flag attached to a long stick as he zigzagged through the hundreds of thousands of happy faces at the 440,500 square metre square – the size of about 30 cricket grounds. Just arrived in the country, we followed him, like a bunch of schoolchildren on an excursion. People came from all parts of China. The young and the old alike were seen taking pictures, with selfie sticks galore. Their looks indicated that they were economically well off, cultured and that they have surplus money to spend on travel, which is now made easy by the super-grade road networks and transport systems.
We learnt that China’s domestic tourism has been growing by ten percent for the past decade or so and it constitutes 4 percent of China’s GDP of 9 trillion dollars.
If Chinese citizens have only one chance to visit a city in their life time, said Mr. Rocky, they would choose Beijing. If they were told that they could go to only one place in Beijing, he said they would select Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen in Chinese means the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Since the Communist revolution of 1949, the Gate, built in the 15th century during the Ming dynasty, has become the symbol of state power.