How to meet the challenges of globalization? Wen Tiejun: Narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and achieve common prosperity

Everyone says that I am the first scholar in China to put forward the problem of the three rural areas, which is actually not very appropriate. I have only added two dimensions to the policy discussions of the 1990s that are more focused on agricultural production, that is, we should emphasize the protection of farmers' interests and the sustainable development of rural areas. Because China is a big peasant country, if we talk about agricultural production aside, I think it is biased.

In fact, the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy will take another 20 years to complete. If, according to Comrade Xiaoping, on the one hand, poverty is not socialism, what we did in the past was to encourage some people to get rich first; on the other hand, to achieve common prosperity is the goal of economic development. If the final result of reform and opening up is polarization, it can be said that we have failed. In the 1980s, Comrade Xiaoping had already set the goal of "common prosperity", and in the first half of the 1980s, the prospect of common prosperity was also shown, when township enterprises and urbanization led to the prosperity of rural industries; but due to the later period of having to deal with fiscal deficits and inflation, as well as the United States leading the West to sanction China and foreign investment withdrawal, township enterprises began to close down on a large scale and the bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises caused the income of labor groups to decline. The ability to alleviate the polarization of the rich and the poor in society by means of fiscal secondary distribution throughout the 1990s was seriously insufficient, and although the "Eighty-Seven Poverty Alleviation Plan" was established in 1993, it was impossible to do without financial resources.

Therefore, at this stage, we once again emphasize that the realization of common prosperity is not only the party's historical responsibility, but more importantly, the challenges to globalization that we are facing are probably a fairly long-term process.

This globalization challenge does not refer to the anti-globalization trend since the epidemic, but China's development has always been full of challenges. Why do we now say that we are facing "a major change that has not occurred in a hundred years"? Because since the 2008 U.S. financial crisis, its administration has continued to create excess liquidity on a large scale and pass on to the world the cost of the collapse of the virtual expansion bubble of U.S. financial capital. For us, this means that the more we import, the more we produce for the world, the more we will eat inflation, which is simply called imported inflation, and who wants to continue to eat the price of others like this? This is the number one problem of the globalization challenge.

Then in 2014 the United States stopped quantitative easing, those countries that benefited from soaring prices have spent all their gains, and when prices fall sharply, such as oil prices from $148 to $30, these countries that have benefited from rising raw material prices suddenly have no benefits, and consumption suddenly shrinks, leading to global deflation.

From global inflation to global deflation, objectively speaking, it is the so-called dominant country that has led globalization, should we continue to follow this cost-absorbing approach? Why do we adjust to a double-cycle strategy with the domestic cycle as the main body, because one moment of global inflation, one moment of global deflation, import inflation and import deflation are all responsible for China's continuous introduction of quantitative easing in the United States, Europe and Japan. Coupled with the continuous attack of global trade wars, science and technology wars, and financial wars in recent years, even if we want to go the old way, people will not let it.

So the globalization challenge we encountered is not only the supply chain damage caused by the epidemic, in fact, there have been about 10 years before the epidemic, and China has been facing the problem of globalization cost transfer with great ups and downs. Therefore, we must strengthen our own construction, practice our internal strength, lay a solid foundation, and take rural revitalization as a ballast stone to cope with the challenges of globalization.