Elite Chinese Politics and Political Economy

A reader makes a very incisive comment on the NDRC piece "So it appears to me that the article is a stock of different (and sometimes conflicting) opinions and perspectives. Or maybe all this is just a disguise that makes the criticism on PBOC less explicit?" I think this is definitely a possibility, that criticism of MOF, which is weaker than the criticism of PBOC, was included to disguise the main target of the piece, the PBOC. The other possibility is that the criticism was aimed toward the senior technocrats in the past eight years: Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao. The paragraph I translated in the previous post states that macro-policy direction is really determined by the "highest level." So, if coordination isn't so good, then perhaps it is the fault of the "highest level."