Article/Wu Xiaobo, columnist of Sina Financial Opinion Leader Column (WeChat official account kopleader)
Today, private capital groups have occupied a dominant position in social networking, e-commerce, mobile payment, real estate, logistics, media and information. The emergence of this "new half of the country" scene is the biggest change in China's industrial landscape and ownership reform, which have taken place in the last decade or more.
The emergence of the "new half of the country" scene is the biggest change in China's industrial landscape and ownership reform. The sudden change of the pattern has brought us into a new window period of institutional innovation.
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In the early morning of August 24 this year, a girl in Yueqing, Zhejiang Province, was raped and killed by a driver on her way on a Didi hitchhiker. During this time, the girl's friend complained about the information to the Didi platform without a response. After the case was exposed, there was a public outcry, and Didi immediately announced the suspension of late night services.
However, on September 15, Didi resumed late night service. During the suspension, another wave of public opinion emerged: "If there is no Didi, how can we travel?" Didi, founded in 2012, restructured China's special car travel in just a few years through Internet technology and fierce price war, accounting for 92.5% of the market share.
If special car travel is the infrastructure of urban life, then Didi is undoubtedly a "monopolist" and irreplaceable.
Before Didi appeared, the industry was dominated by tens of thousands of taxi companies, almost all of which were in the hands of state-owned capital groups around the country, forming access barriers with the license system. Didi uses technology to break the wall and make its advantages irreversible.
In today's China, there are many private enterprises like Didi that have absolute advantages in infrastructure.
In the circulation market, Ali and JD control more than half of the clothing and home appliance retail, while Shunfeng and "Four Links and One Access" dominate the logistics;
In the information market, Tencent and Weibo have controlled social traffic, Baidu has reined in the search portal, and today headlines occupy the head of news distribution. Almost all the influence of government media must be based on the platform they provide;
In the life service market, Meituan Dianping, Ctrip, 58 Tongcheng and other companies have penetrated into all aspects of residents' lives, and made related industrial services more and more concentrated;
In the financial service market, Alibaba and Tencent have formed a duopoly in the mobile payment sector, and are deconstructing the operational processes and existing advantages of the traditional banking industry through supply chain finance;
In the real estate market, in 2017, there were three companies with an operating income of more than 500 billion yuan, and 13 others with an income of more than 100 billion yuan, the vast majority of which were private enterprises, which had a huge impact on macroeconomic stability and household consumption;
In the international trade market, Ali's cross-border e-commerce business is driving scattered foreign retail trade to a unified information platform;
At the end of the last century, if we talk about the infrastructure of the national economy, they are power, finance, energy, communication operators, etc., which are basically completely controlled by state-owned capital groups, Today, private capital groups have occupied a dominant position in social networking, e-commerce, mobile payment, real estate, logistics, media and information.
The emergence of this "new half of the country" scene is the biggest change in China's industrial landscape and ownership reform, which have taken place in the last decade or more.
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The forty years of China's reform, in a word, is the history of the rise of private economy and the fierce game between state-owned and private capital groups in this process.
The cognition of the role of private enterprises in the national economy is regarded as a process of ideological emancipation. As early as 1981, the official formulation was "planned economy dominated, supplemented by market regulation". In 1984, it proposed "planned commodity economy", and in 1987, it iterated into "socialist commodity economy combining planning and market". The subtle progression of these three statements shows that the market forces are getting closer and stronger step by step.
The first time that the private sector was recognized as the "half of the country" of the national economy was in 1988, when the number of private sector employees exceeded the number of state-owned enterprises for the first time in history. In a speech, Deng Xiaoping believed that "the biggest accident of the central government during the decade of reform and opening up was the sudden emergence of township enterprises". It was also in this year that the new term "entrepreneur" appeared in the media for the first time, and the policy department began to discuss where the state-owned enterprises would go. Someone proposed the reform plan of "transforming the existing state-owned enterprises into limited liability companies".
The debate has not stopped since then. At the beginning of 1992, Deng Xiaoping put forward "the essence of socialism is to liberate and develop the productive forces" in his speech on the southern tour. At the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of China in October, the Central Committee clearly put forward the strategic goal of "building a socialist market economy system".
Under this program, there is still a great space for discussion on the role orientation and role of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises. Among them, the most important political debate is whether the growth of private enterprises will change our socialist system. In a 1997 paper, Wu Jinglian believed that "as long as the Communist Party has adopted correct policies to effectively prevent the polarization of wealth distribution, the socialist nature of our country is guaranteed no matter how small the state-owned economy is."
From 1998 to 2003, the state-owned enterprise system carried out two rounds of major restructuring reforms, namely, "focusing on the large and releasing the small" and "the state retreating and the people advancing", and private enterprises were also greatly encouraged and developed. In the end, the theoretical consensus reached by the government and the public is—— The state-owned enterprises must play a leading role in the pillar industries related to the national economy and the people's livelihood, and the private enterprises should actively play a supporting role and play a beneficial complementary role.
In the following ten years, this assertion was the basic premise of many economic system innovations, and even on the ideological level, it did not encounter challenges - except that in the university economics class, students will occasionally dispute one or two.
If there is no revolutionary factor mutation, it seems that the Chu River Han boundary between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises will always be maintained peacefully.
Feng Lun, a private entrepreneur, repeatedly told his friends: "In the face of state-owned capital, private capital can advance and retreat freely and develop continuously only if it always adheres to the position of cooperation without competition, supplement without substitution, and subsidiary without arrogance. Private capital has always been the subsidiary or supplement of state-owned capital, so the best way to protect oneself is to stay away from the monopoly area of state-owned capital, settle in a corner, do some small business, actively do good deeds, and build roads and bridges. "
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So, Today's great change is not the result of institutional innovation, but the product of technological change. In other words, it is the result of the information revolution.
During the industrial revolution, the means for state-owned enterprises to gain industrial leadership is to control the "ferry" and strategic energy.
The so-called "ferry" is the node of information transaction. The government forms an access system through the license plate, so as to control the distribution of information and ideological products, and obtain dominance and commercial interests from it. Strategic energy is located in the upper reaches of the industrial manufacturing industry. Through its monopoly and price control, state-owned capital can not only avoid confrontation with private enterprises in the field of full competition, but can share benefits in the prosperity created by the latter.
After 2003, the state-owned capital was basically distributed in these two fields, counting more than 100 central enterprises today, without exception. In the 2018 Top 500 list of Chinese enterprises, the top five are respectively State Grid, Sinopec, PetroChina and China Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Chinese architecture 。 Among the top 30 enterprises, only five came from private capital groups, including Huawei and Ping An. From this perspective, it can be clearly seen that under the established strategic objectives and industrial pattern, the strength and control of state-owned enterprises have not been weakened.
Today's change is a "redefinition" - in the transition process from the industrial age to the information age, what is the "pillar industry related to the national economy and the people's livelihood" and what is the "infrastructure of the national economy" in the Chinese society in the 2010s.
In September this year, Alibaba celebrated its 19th anniversary, and on November 11, Tencent celebrated its 20th anniversary. They are now the companies with the highest market capitalization in Asia. It was between 1998 and 1999 that Sina, Sohu, NetEase, Baidu, Ctrip, Jingdong, etc. started their businesses together with these two companies.
If these enterprises are heroes in the Internet PC era, then today's "small three giants" - Didi, Meituan Dianping and Today's Headlines were all born around 2012, and they are giants under the mobile Internet.
In this 20-year Internet movement, Ma Yun and Ma Huateng have innovated in technology and mode, changed the distribution of resources and interests in many industries, re created order and game rules, and thus disrupted one "ferry" after another under the control of state-owned capital.
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This process was realized without direct physical conflict and contention. In all the affected areas, state-owned enterprises have hardly lost or done anything wrong, and have gradually been robbed of their leading ability.
During the industrial revolution, all competitive advantages were materialized and quantified. Sinopec and PetroChina can quickly establish an unshakable absolute advantage as long as they control the exploitation right and oil import right of the oil field and incorporate all gas stations.
However, during the information revolution, the dominant power of choice no longer belongs to the resource support formula, but is transferred to hundreds of millions of consumers. This requires the use of the most advanced Internet technology, continuous optimization and countless trial and error iterations, which is precisely the ability that the state-owned enterprise system is difficult to cultivate.
So, Nowadays, those enterprises that are regarded as new infrastructure providers adopt the growth model of off-site reconstruction (e-commerce), river diversion (social networking) or maintenance upgrading and reconstruction (service). They are not in the same competitive dimension and game space with state-owned capital groups, and even the discourse system is totally different.
During the "main supporting role" period, state-owned asset groups were located in the upstream and core "ferry" of the industry. From the aspects of energy material procurement, equipment import indicators, product export quotas, financial services and other aspects, they could form interest seeking and strategic restraint for private enterprises. However, today, new economy companies are located in the upstream of information, and their industrial dependence on traditional state-owned enterprises is very low. The main supporting role structure between the two has disappeared.
This scene is strange and unprecedented, and it needs to be faced by both political and business circles.
A month ago, someone put forward the "theory of private enterprises leaving the market", which caused great panic and controversy. In fact, after rational analysis, the proponents of this theory have no understanding of the "new half of the country" pattern. In today's China's industrial economy, once the State Grid, CNPC and China Mobile leave the scene, the consequences will certainly be unimaginable. What if Ali, Tencent and even Didi suddenly leave?
The risk lies not only in commercial interests, but also in the cost of public order.
Therefore, in a sense, Feng Lun's warning has actually failed.
Private capital has been unable to "settle in a corner". Their business has become larger and larger, and they have obviously entered the so-called "pillar industries related to the national economy and the people's livelihood" - or, they have independently built many pillar industries and become suppliers of new infrastructure. Nowadays, some giant Internet companies can be regarded as "national enterprises" or "social enterprises". It is ridiculous and unrealistic to define and demand them by "actively playing a supporting role and playing a beneficial complementary role".
To turn a blind eye to this scene will undoubtedly lead to a major miscalculation of national conditions. Today, the anxiety and confusion about the future of private enterprises, as well as the mismatch of relevant policies, are essentially the role discomfort caused by the sudden change of the pattern.
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Looking into the future of China, private capital groups' expansion capacity in new pillar industries may become stronger and stronger.
The first is the big data industry, which is considered as the "oil of the future" and the infrastructure of all industries. In the field of big data and cloud services, Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are divided into three parts, and the pattern is basically determined.
Moreover, it seems difficult to change the leading phenomenon of private enterprises in the emerging high-tech industries that will determine the next decade, whether in artificial intelligence, biological genes, new materials, new energy and other fields.
Another strategic force that is often ignored is venture capital groups. Their trillions of venture capital funds will expand one "race track" after another, further accelerating the pace of industrial mutation.
This pattern of capital competition and cooperation brought about by technological breakthroughs has forced people to rethink the role and coexistence of state-owned capital and private capital in the national economy. This topic, in fact, is the beginning of reform and opening up.
Forty years ago, in 1978, there was no private enterprise in China. By 1988, it had become a "half of the country" in the sense of employment. Today in 2018, we have proposed a new "half of the country". From this, you are surprised to find that China's reform, which seems to have no preset route, has always had a strong internal logic of marketization. Like the mighty river flowing eastward, there are hundreds of twists and turns in the process. The waves fight against the rocks, and the old water fights against the new. However, no one can resist the tenacity of the trend and the purpose.
The great change in the pattern has brought us into a new window period of institutional innovation.
Even in my opinion, deregulation in the classic sense may not be the decisive theme for the future ownership reform, but the more challenging proposition is: How to explore the innovative paradigm of state-owned capital, reposition the role and role of private enterprises in the national economy, and whether it is necessary to establish a new economic consultation system.
If the changes brought about by technological innovation are rigid and irreversible, then institutional innovation may be more flexible and have local characteristics. What we need to be aware of is the conflict and cognitive dislocation between the two, as well as the choice of possible paths.
This is a small column that does not provide answers, which may be a bit inappropriate.
However, I hope that more people can read it and trigger necessary thinking. The greatness and complexity of China's economic reform lies in its unprecedented and no reference. In this sense, I am different from some predecessors of the market school. I recognize the real existence of Chinese characteristics.
(The author of this article is a financial writer. This column is the content of Wu Xiaobo's WeChat official account "Wu Xiaobo Channel".)
