Re: China should start by creating localized political autonomy such as at a mayoral level. Communist party officials at the local level should be accountable to the people they represent. Start there and form the core of localized political control.
According to WTO pundits, the challenge facing China is rather the other way around...
feer.com
Excerpt:
A country of 1.3 billion people with 27 provinces and four vast province-level cities would be a recipe for local trade barriers anywhere. In China, the problem is exacerbated by a weak central government and a 20-year-old economic reform effort that replaced national bureaucratic planning with local bureaucratic capitalism.
Interprovincial restrictions on the flow of goods are well known. Tobacco and alcohol products from other localities face outright bans in some places. Henan and Anhui provinces, for example, have bans on tobacco products from Guizhou, while a bottle of Beijing's Yanjing beer which sells for the equivalent of 18 cents in the capital costs $1 in Sichuan province as a result of provincial fees and taxes.
Agricultural products like grain, flour and soybeans remain subject to internal trade barriers while the circulation of bottled water and medicine is also heavily restricted by local standards. Even newspapers are affected. In May authorities in the model economic zone of Shenzhen, abutting Hong Kong, banned sales of a newspaper from nearby Guangzhou because it was stealing readers from the local government-run papers.
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Interprovincial investment is also deterred by the judiciary. Local courts rule in favour of local companies by a margin of two to one, according to official figures, and often ignore the flouting of court orders by local companies which have lost a case. "Local courts have become the courts of localities. They protect local interests," China's top judge, Xiao Yang, said in a speech last year.
The economic impact of all this in terms of higher prices and less efficient investment is hard to gauge. Overcapacity in many sectors is one obvious result. Virtually every province has a maker of washing machines, colour televisions, and refrigerators. The country also has 120 automakers, most of them surviving on various forms of local protection. Beijing wants to reduce the number to just half a dozen, but 22 provinces or cities have declared the sector to be a core industry for the coming decade.
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