Special contributor to glacier thought bank | Liu Zhanxiong
Just two or three days before the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian army had a great chance of winning, and it seemed that it could easily take Ukraine, and at that time, there was even a saying on the Internet that Putin was the greatest person in the Russian nation in three or four hundred years, after Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.
Now, Russia is mired in war.
After the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eastern European countries experienced population contraction and outflow, Latvia lost 1/5 of its population to the West after the 1990s, and Romania lost 3/10. About 9 million ukrainian laborers migrate seasonally every year to work in EU countries, and 20% of Ukraine's total population is employed abroad.
In Eastern European countries, the indigenous empty nest is very serious, the economy is backwards, and Romania even once experienced a significant increase in infant mortality, because the country's doctors and nurses lost nearly half, and the medical industry was seriously short of people.
In the autumn of critical survival, several brave and wise reformers emerged, such as Balcelovich in Poland, Klaus in the Czech Republic, and Kornai in Hungary, who operated on the national economy and revived the dead. With the recovery of industry, ordinary people do not have to go out to earn a living, and the trend of population outflow has slowed. Some countries have also ushered in a small baby boom, and the fertility rate has exceeded that of the planned economy era.
This kind of economic reformer who has made great contributions to the survival and development of his own nation is the hero and great man of his own nation.
01
Regrettably, during the transition period in Ukraine, there were no outstanding reformers like Balcelovich and Klaus.
For many years, the eastern and western parts of Ukraine have torn each other apart and caused political turmoil, and the root cause is also in the economic structure.
During the former Soviet Union, there was a clear division of labor in various countries, russia itself provided industrial raw materials such as oil, Kazakhstan produced crops such as cotton, the Baltic Sea engaged in light industry, and Ukraine and Belarus produced steel cars, with heavy industry as the pillar.
Although Ukraine became politically independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its industrial economy was not independent and still did not break away from the foundation of the Soviet state-owned enterprise economy.
Ukraine's heavy industrial belt is concentrated in the eastern regions such as Donbass.
▲ The movie "Donbass", about the conflict that occurred in the Donbass region in 2014 (Photo/ Douban)
This industrial structure problem is very hot to solve, and if it is linked to the contradictions between cultural ethnic groups (Russian is spoken in eastern Ukraine, Orthodox Christianity is believed, and Western Ukraine is Catholic), it becomes a powder keg.
Some time ago, there was a post circulating on the Internet that Ukraine had a fantastic start, the industrial system was very advanced, and then it was destroyed by the evil Western capitalism.
This statement is very funny, the donbass region's old state-owned enterprises are too burdensome, people are overstaffed, seniority, lack of innovation.
▲Donbass, Ukraine in the autumn of 2015 (Photo/Figureworm Creative)
The Wudong region originally had no intention of separating, but the life was too bad, so it turned pro-Russian. In the referendum on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the eastern Ukrainian states raised their hands in favor, and the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (that is, the two places that now declare independence) originally voted for Ukraine's independence accounted for 83.86% and 83.90%, and even Crimea, where Russians have an absolute demographic advantage, also advocated secession from the Soviet Union and mixed with Ukraine.
After the independence of Ukraine, the western and central regions did not have the burden of state-owned enterprises, small and medium-sized private enterprises blossomed everywhere, while the heavy industry in the eastern part of Ukraine was delayed in transformation, assets became a burden, debts were like mountains, the economy was slipping, and the people's mentality collapsed.
02
The more economically depressed the place, the more extremism is rife and people are confused. The most active regions of the far right in Germany today are the former East German states.
After the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the two Germanys were reunified, and the economy of the former East Germany was weak, and the industry and commerce lacked competitiveness. The Annual Report on the State of German Reunification 2014 shows that more than one-fifth of the population in the eastern region is at risk of falling into poverty. None of Germany's 100 largest companies is headquartered in the east.
Most of the far-right forces come from unemployed youth in these places. Germany's most popular far-right alternative party, the Eastern-based Alternative, has a solid support rating of more than 10 percent and has won 83 parliamentary seats in the last two general elections.
▲ On October 3, 2016, the extreme right wing of Germany marched and demonstrated (Photo/Reuters)
In order to stabilize the east, the developed West Germany vigorously transfused its finances. In the first year of reunification, it subsidized 143 billion marks in the eastern region at once, taking over the state-owned enterprises in the planned economy era, and the amount of subsidies soared to 1.63 trillion marks in 1999.
If you think about it, with the development and prosperity of the German economy, it is very difficult to repair, let alone Ukraine. The Siu region is barely self-sufficient and has no spare energy to transfuse blood to the Donbass region.
The reason for the difficulty of transformation in the former East Germany region is similar to that in the Wudong region, whose factory product line is completely tailor-made for the Soviet industry, and the industrial system and standards, specifications and quality requirements of the United States and Europe are incompatible, so they cannot be integrated into the international market.
Typical industry arms and weapons industry, as we all know, the characteristics of Soviet-made weapons are stupid black and thick, durable, operation and maintenance are very simple, shortcomings are also obvious, manufacturing costs are high, production capacity is wasted, and the use of energy consumption is high. The Soviet weapon masterpiece AK47, the structure is loose, the product is not fine enough, because the Soviet Union lacks high-precision machine tools.
Ukraine's military industry has inherited the characteristics of stupid black and rough, inferior to Us-made weapons, but it just so happens that buyers do not care, India, Azerbaijan and other countries, the military and defense departments are some bosses and rough, just like the Mouth of Soviet-made weapons.
In this war, the Soviet tanks used by the Russian army were high in fuel consumption.
Photo/Weibo
The largest military-industrial research production line during the Soviet period remained in the Donbass region after the dissolution. Relying on the global arms business, the production of aircraft and tanks, as well as aircraft carriers, rockets, large transport aircraft and other land, sea and air equipment, the Wudong region can barely eat a bite of food, which also led to a weak willingness to reform.
The Soviet Union left 3594 military enterprises, 3 million employees, plus employees in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, the system is very large. Several pro-European presidents in Ukraine did not dare to take action against it, and once there was a mistake in reform, tens of millions of people lost their jobs, and no one dared to take on this responsibility.
03
When the Russian-Ukrainian conflict first broke out, there were bloggers on the Internet who blindly made up a story of 96 of Ukraine's 100 oligarchs.
The list does not have a specific name, casually said, and the spread is still very widespread.
Except for a few who became rich in the administrative monopoly of the heavy oil industry, most of the rich people in Ukraine have no power and most of them get rich by hard work and courage.
They run businesses related to daily necessities, such as brewers, supermarkets, daily necessities wholesalers, and catering. If this can be called oligarchy, then brands such as Lao Gan Ma and Yang Guofu Spicy Hot, which are well known in China, can also be called oligarchs?
And some businessmen are transnational operations, opening up the global market, these people's main income is abroad, not limited to Ukraine, so they can reach a property valuation of one or two hundred million US dollars. Being able to open the market abroad and make a profit in fair competition is more indicative of its commercial capabilities.
Of course, there are indeed people who have become rich through collusion between officials and businessmen, but these real oligarchs happen to be mostly pro-Russian factions. They went up and down the heavy industry state-owned enterprises in the Wudong region to extract oil and water, and the pro-Russian presidents such as Kuchma and Yanukovych were members of them.
In order to maintain his rule, Yanukovych showed no mercy to his enemies and firmly grasped power without letting go. Others followed suit, inciting populist sentiment and countering violence with violence.
As the party struggle escalated step by step, some politicians killed the red eye and fell into a battle of wills, and nothing else mattered. Typical female Prime Minister Tymoshenko, who originally belonged to the pro-Russian friendly faction, made a lot of concessions in the gas negotiations with Putin. She overthrew Yanukovych in power during the Orange Revolution, relying on populist sentiment and street politics, and later Yanukovych's comeback and ruthlessly rehabilitated his political enemies, so Tymoshenko's diplomacy shifted 180 degrees, jumping from a hardcore pro-Russian stance to a hardcore pro-European stance.
In fact, Tymoshenko was born and raised in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a traditional pro-Russian region in the east, and she also relied on the eastern box office to enter politics. However, for the sake of power, Tymoshenko and Yanukovych of the pro-Russian camp infighting, personal grudges on the head, a major change in policy, and encouraged his own men to boycott the gas pipeline with Russia.
In the process of reforming the shareholding system in state-owned enterprises, some parties have also shown similar intentions, and the same politician, who showed a very leftist appearance when he was in the opposition, strongly opposed the privatization of state-owned enterprises of the ruling party, but after he came to power, he changed his face and talked about the benefits of privatization.
In the political struggle, ukraine often has such a situation, today the government changed the state-owned enterprises, tomorrow the enterprises are re-nationalized, today the government signed a gas cooperation agreement with Russia, tomorrow it is shelved.
In the long run, no policy can be pushed off, and the Ukrainian economy is stuck in a vicious circle.
▲ Movie "Donbass" (Photo/Douban)
It can be seen from this that the market-oriented reform is important and difficult.
You can go to the slum-filled Bangladesh of India, to see inflation, currency depreciation of money is not as good as toilet paper in Latin America, to see the GDP is not as good as Guangdong province of Russia.
The failed economic system of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and India, all of which were closed to the independent industrialization of the country, and then failed completely.
Thirty or forty years ago, the importance of China's market-oriented reforms cannot be overemphasized.
China experienced the reform of state-owned enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s, freed itself from the influence of the Soviet Union, connected with the international community, and embarked on an export-oriented East Asian economic model.
If Deng Xiaoping and other leaders had not shouldered the pressure at that time, there would have been no subsequent economic take-off. It was precisely at that time that China seized the opportunity of development, promoted the rapid development of reform, opening up and modernization, and revitalized the economy.