ABSTRACT
China now has a passion for liberty and is in a stage of passionate liberalism. Over the past 25 years, a frenzy of business launches has been stimulated by the relaxation of administrative control and regulation and a major release of long bottled-up popular energy. Opening to the outside world, globalization and great changes to the economic base have led to fluctuations and even collapse in the social value system. The profit motive has as a result been unfettered and is raging everywhere. The hurried inflation of individual desire at the same time to some extent facilitated unrestrained, fierce, free competition, ultimately causing China’s economy to post astonishing achievements – in 2005 its GDP surpassed both those of England and France, ranking fourth in the world.1 On the other hand however, surging desire and one-sided devotion to the GDP, together with lags in political reform and public construction, led to a series of serious problems: inequality of opportunity, the law of the jungle, lack of distributive justice, polarization of rich and poor, spreading systemic corruption, environmental deterioration, energy shortages, imbalance of basic social relations, etc., the prime indicator of which was the increase to 87,000 of cases of group conflicts (involving 15 or more people) in 2005.2
In just such circumstances, voices demanding distributive justice and social harmony have been growing louder. In order to maintain stability, even the government must reconsider “laissez fair freedom” and highly capricious “unplanned regulation,” striving to transform the mode of economic management, and critically ranking the measures other countries have taken to adapt to the unified global market – a novel situation wherein capital and even labor can vote with their feet. Economic competition is, by this token, curbed to some extent by institutional competition. China, clearly, must now further improve its investment environment: all open, transparent, and more effective institutionalised means – punishing corruption and other crimes, or reorganizing the market order – can and should be adopted. And to coordinate relations between freedom and coercion, a complete set of legal
procedures and realistic criteria of judgment is needed for the recognition of rights, the redistribution of incomes and resources and the restraint of government actions. Carrying out the rule of law has thus become the basic consensus of the present stage.
