正文
When Z
hou Xiaochuan took the helm of China’s central bank 15 years ago, the world was very different. China had just joined the World Trade Organisation and its economy was still smaller than Britain’s. Foreign investors paid little heed to the new governor of the People’s Bank of China. He seemed safe to ignore: another black-haired, bespectacled official whose talk was littered with socialist bromides.
Mr Zhou is widely expected to retire in the coming weeks. He leaves with China far stronger and his own role much more prominent. No one person can take credit for the flourishing economy. But Mr Zhou, who is 70, deserves more than most. He helped forge the monetary environment for China’s growth. He also went a long way to dragging the financial system out of the mire of central planning, even if reforms fell short of his own wishes.
His achievements are surprising. China makes no pretence of having an independent central bank. The People’s Bank is under the State Council, or cabinet. But with political acumen and a command of economics, Mr Zhou carved out power for himself. As the years silvered his hair, his decision to leave it undyed, rare among high-ranking cadres, marked him out as different, even a bit daring.
It did not hurt that, as the son of Zhou Jiannan, a senior Communist official, he enjoyed the privileged status of “princeling”. From his early career in the 1980s, he advocated a more market-based economy. He helped design the “bad banks” that freed Chinese banks of their failed loans and paved the way for a boom. As stockmarket regulator, he was nicknamed “The Flayer” for trying to root out corruption. Mr Zhou was not a radical but, by China’s standards, a staunch economic liberal.
