In September, the Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang stepped on to the stage in a conference centre in Tianjin to address the attendees gathered for the World Economic Forum’s annual China meeting. The offer of reassurance to the Davos crowd may be becoming a habit: Xi Jinping did it in 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. His message was that China will not abandon multilateralism; that China supports globalisation; that China will progressively open its economy. In Tianjin, however, Li Keqiang was obliged to address fresh anxieties: how fragile is the Chinese economy, overburdened with debt? Will the long-promised reforms to China’s market ever happen? Will China respond to the growing chorus of complaint about unfair trading practices, and will Trump’s trade war bring down the whole house of cards?
The premier acknowledged the difficulties, but repeated the steady-as-she-goes promises: no massive stimulus, no competitive devaluation of China’s currency, and a progressive reallocation of credit away from China’s giant state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and towards small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a growing and increasingly innovative private sector.