Wu Jinglian teaching at CEIBS

Economy and trust – the WTO column

Economy and trust have a very close relationship, I learned from the economy lessons at my middle school. When people lose their confidence, the economy is in trouble. How complicated that relationship I see in China, a low-trust society where people have trouble in even trusting themselves, combined with an amazing economic growth.

In this relationship between trust and economy you would expect that economists, media and especially the combination of the two have an important role. Those economists use the media to tell you want is true and false, provided you trust those economists.

Not in China.

A wide-ranging debate is spilling over from the Chinese internet on how many Chinese economists are really trusted by the Chinese. The original shortlist of five economists is now back to only two: Lang Xianping and Wu Jinglian. A pretty short list for a country of the size of China and an emerging economy on top of that.

Financial media are not doing much better. The media that can really command authority are, despite all the propaganda on market economy, those media that represent the government. Not that they are trusted in the sense that they tell the truth, but they tell you what the government wants you to believe and make sense in that Chinese way. Other media lack that position and there is actually no leading financial paper.
Chinese media are still too much restricted to political control and when things get troublesome, they would rather stick to the boredom of Xinhua dispatches in stead of running risks. Exploring the possibilities has been done very much in the outspoken talkshow by Lang Xianping, showing that the lack of imagination of the financial media and most economists might be actually a larger problem problem than that of media control.
Even famous magazines like Caijing do complain about the restrictions they face, also by the parent organizations they still belong to. Earning the trust of your readers is tough and just like the economists, financial media seem not to be able to do just that.

In the quoted survey people say they would rather prefer independent scholars, while most economists present themselves as representatives of special interesting groups or even the government. Independent academics like Liang and Wu are the way out, but that needs rather daring people, who are not readily available in China.